r/booksuggestions · 2023
Most-mentioned books in r/booksuggestions during 2023
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/booksuggestions within the published source unit for 2023. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.
#1 Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
A dying astronaut wakes up alone on a spaceship with amnesia, two corpses for company, and Earth's one shot at survival riding on him.
#2 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)
Martha Wells
A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.
#3 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.
#4 The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune
A caseworker is sent to inspect an orphanage of six dangerous magical children, one of them the literal Antichrist, and has to decide whether to file the report that shuts it down.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#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 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.
#10 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.
#11 The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A falsely imprisoned sailor spends fourteen years in a fortress, learns of a hidden fortune, and returns to make sure everyone who wronged him pays for it.
#12 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.
#13 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.
#14 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.
#15 Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he used to have a different name.
#16 The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
An orogene comes home to find her son beaten to death and her daughter gone, the same day a continent starts splitting apart.
#17 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.
#18 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.
#19 Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Two retired Texas Rangers drive a stolen cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, and half of them don't make it back.
#20 The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
A woman between life and death gets a library of every alternate version of her life and has to pick one before dawn or die for real.
#21 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.
#22 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.
#23 Dark Matter
Blake Crouch
The multiverse thriller Reddit reaches for on autopilot, sometimes typing nothing but the title and still getting upvoted into the hundreds.
#24 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.
#25 Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
A teenage drifter joins a scalp-hunting militia across the Texas-Mexico borderlands, led by a hairless giant who may not be entirely human.