Subreddit

Top books from r/RomanceBooks

A genre-focused recommendation and discussion community where readers specify trope, viewpoint, heat level, pairing, setting, and the exact emotional experience they want.

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

148

Books ranked

36,103

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

—

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

r/RomanceBooks turns recommendation into a detailed matching problem. In 62,806 qualifying 2026 comments, The Hating Game leads with 97 mentions, followed by The Love Hypothesis (78), Pride and Prejudice (69), Book Lovers (63), and A Court of Thorns and Roses (62). The top five already show the community's range: workplace rom-com, academic fake dating, Austen, contemporary publishing romance, and contested romantasy. ACOTAR and Fourth Wing attract substantial criticism, so raw rank is never presented as approval. Compared with r/YAlit, this community is also more precise about adult classification and more likely to identify why a title fits—or violates—a requested romance contract.

By year

2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

Most-mentioned in r/RomanceBooks

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

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Sarah J. Maas

Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, gets dragged into the faerie lands as payment, and spends five books choosing a court.

6,852 in this sub critical

The Hating Game

Sally Thorne

Two rival executives who despise each other are stuck sharing an office, until the hating starts feeling like something else entirely.

4,459 in this sub mixed

The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood

A cynical biology PhD fake-dates a famously prickly professor to fend off a colleague, and the fake part stops being the point somewhere around the second grant meeting.

2,747 in this sub mixed

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.

2,217 in this sub positive

Book Lovers

Emily Henry

A New York literary agent's sister-bonding trip to a small town keeps running her into the same brooding local book editor.

1,692 in this sub positive

Beach Read

Emily Henry

Two blocked novelists end up in neighboring lake houses, not beach houses, and spend the summer daring each other to write outside their own genre.

1,680 in this sub positive

Fourth Wing

Rebecca Yarros

A war college trains dragon riders by letting classmates kill the weak ones off, and the heroine's body was built for neither a dragon nor a sword.

1,603 in this sub critical

Outlander

Diana Gabaldon

A WWII combat nurse touches a stone circle in Scotland and wakes up in 1743, married to a Highland warrior twenty years before she's born.

1,393 in this sub mixed

Throne of Glass

Sarah J. Maas

A teenage assassin is pulled out of a slave-labor camp and entered in a kingdom's brutal death-match tournament to win her freedom.

1,379 in this sub mixed

#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.

1,378 in this sub Not scored

#11

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.

957 in this sub positive

#12

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.

783 in this sub positive

#13

Uprooted

Naomi Novik

A village girl is taken by an ancient wizard as tribute every ten years, until the year his choice turns out to be a mistake he can't undo.

605 in this sub Not scored

#14

Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik

A moneylender's daughter out-bargains a winter king to save her family, in a Rumpelstiltskin retelling with a Jewish heroine at its center.

532 in this sub Not scored

#15

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.

531 in this sub Not scored

#16

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo

Kaz Brekker recruits five other criminal teenagers for a heist inside a supposedly impenetrable ice fortress.

518 in this sub positive

#17

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.

384 in this sub Not scored

#18

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.

361 in this sub Not scored

#19

The Bear and the Nightingale

Katherine Arden

A girl in medieval Russia keeps the household spirits fed with scraps of bread while a priest convinces her village those same spirits are demons.

333 in this sub positive

#20

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid

A reclusive Old Hollywood icon finally agrees to tell her real story, husband by husband, but insists on giving it only to an unknown magazine writer.

322 in this sub Not scored

#21

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.

317 in this sub Not scored