r/booksuggestions · 2020
Most-mentioned books in r/booksuggestions during 2020
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/booksuggestions within the published source unit for 2020. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling
An eleven-year-old orphan gets a letter, a train platform that shouldn't exist, and a scar that makes him famous for something he can't remember.
#2 Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
A street thief who can swallow metal and burn it for power gets recruited into a heist crew whose actual target is the immortal emperor who's ruled for a thousand years.
#3 Circe
Madeline Miller
Exiled to an empty island for turning a rival into a monster, a minor goddess spends immortality perfecting the one power the gods never bothered to master.
#4 The Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
A legendary hero narrates his own rise from orphaned street kid to feared arcanist over three days, except Rothfuss never wrote day three.
#5 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A bridgeman slave carries spears through a warzone he's not allowed to fight in, until he decides to become the soldier no one will follow.
#6 The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Patroclus, exiled and overlooked, grows up shadowing Achilles and follows him to Troy already knowing how the war ends for them.
#7 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.
#8 The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
A teenage girl volunteers to fight to the death on live television in place of her younger sister, then spends three books resisting everyone who wants to make her a symbol.
#9 The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
A girl in Nazi Germany steals books while Death narrates, and it's become r/suggestmeabook's default answer to almost any request for something sad.
#10 Dune
Frank Herbert
Paul Atreides survives his family's massacre on a desert planet and becomes the messiah the empire engineered him to be, then has to live with it.
#11 The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
Trollocs burn a village hunting for one of three farm boys, so an Aes Sedai spirits all three out before anyone learns which.
#12 The Martian
Andy Weir
A botanist gets left for dead on Mars after a dust storm and has to grow his own food to survive until the next mission arrives, years later.
#13 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.
#14 Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
A child prodigy recruited into Battle School at six ends up commanding real war fleets, believing until the end that it's all just a simulation.
#15 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.
#16 Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
A plain, broke governess tells off the man she loves in one paragraph, and Reddit has been rereading that paragraph at every age since.
#17 Six of Crows
Leigh Bardugo
Kaz Brekker recruits five other criminal teenagers for a heist inside a supposedly impenetrable ice fortress.
#18 The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
A hobbit who has never left his own pantry gets recruited by thirteen dwarves and a wizard to steal treasure back from a dragon.
#19 Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
A low-level bureaucrat rewrites yesterday's newspapers for a living, until he starts keeping a diary the government would kill him for.
#20 To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
A small-town Alabama lawyer defends a Black man against a rape charge everyone has already decided, watched the whole time by his own two kids.
#21 Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon's IQ triples after experimental brain surgery, then the same surgery begins failing, and he narrates his own decline in real time.
#22 Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
A prideful landowner insults a woman at a dance, then spends the rest of the book making it up to her.
#23 A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends move to New York to build lives together, and one of them never stops paying for what happened to him before the book began.
#24 American Gods
Neil Gaiman
Gods who crossed the ocean with their immigrant worshippers are going extinct in modern America, replaced by whatever people actually worship now.
#25 11/22/63
Stephen King
A substitute teacher steps through a diner's storeroom into 1958 with one job: stop Lee Harvey Oswald before Dallas.