Subreddit

Top books from r/Fantasy

r/Fantasy is Reddit's largest fantasy fiction community, where readers recommend and debate epic, secondary-world, and grimdark fantasy series.

Updated September 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

151

Books ranked

259,626

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

3.9M

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

r/Fantasy's top recommendation is Gardens of the Moon at 3986 mentions, the opening brick of Steven Erikson's ten-volume Malazan Book of the Fallen, a series that barely registers anywhere else in this dataset. The Way of Kings (3461) and The Eye of the World (3187) sit right behind it, and The Lord of the Rings, the genre's supposed founding text, trails all three at 1953. Compare that to r/suggestmeabook, where Mistborn also shows up but at less than half the count (1061 versus 2554 here) among lighter picks like Project Hail Mary and Circe: general readers treat Sanderson as one recommendation among many, while r/Fantasy pushes it as a gateway into a much longer commitment. This is a sub organized around doorstopper series and multi-book arcs, not standalone reads.

By year

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Most-mentioned in r/Fantasy

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

A continent-spanning empire's mage-soldiers besiege a city that might already be doomed by gods playing a board game with human pieces.

24,441 in this sub mixed

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.

18,635 in this sub positive

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.

18,087 in this sub positive

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.

14,828 in this sub positive

The Blade Itself

Joe Abercrombie

A crippled torturer, a vain swordsman, and a berserker haunted by his own alter ego get pulled into a war none of them understand yet.

14,329 in this sub positive

A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin

Ned Stark's family gets pulled into a succession war for the Iron Throne while an unkillable winter creeps south.

13,477 in this sub mixed

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.

12,183 in this sub positive

Assassin's Apprentice

Robin Hobb

A royal bastard trains as the king's poisoner and assassin, and readers fifteen books later still call the ending emotionally devastating.

10,234 in this sub positive

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

A proud boy on a poor island learns real magic, casts one spell out of arrogance, and spends the rest of the book hunted by what it let loose.

7,344 in this sub positive

#10

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.

6,707 in this sub mixed

#11

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.

6,539 in this sub mixed

#12

Storm Front (The Dresden Files)

Jim Butcher

Chicago's only professional wizard takes a case involving black magic and a mob boss, with a police captain who wants it solved fast or him gone.

5,717 in this sub positive

#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.

5,441 in this sub positive

#14

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.

5,373 in this sub positive

#15

The Black Company

Glen Cook

A mercenary company signs a contract with an undying sorceress they call the Lady, on the losing side of a war where the villains already won.

4,985 in this sub positive

#16

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.

4,773 in this sub positive

#17

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Scott Lynch

A conman runs cons on the nobility of a canal city built from alchemical glass, until a rival gang decides to burn his crew down to the ground.

4,135 in this sub positive

#18

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.

3,947 in this sub positive