r/suggestmeabook · 2021
Top books in r/suggestmeabook during 2021
Ranked by mentions in r/suggestmeabook threads dated 2021. Useful for spotting what r/suggestmeabook was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune
A buttoned-up caseworker is sent to inspect an orphanage of six magical children, one of them the literal Antichrist, and has to decide whether the rulebook is wrong.
#2 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)
Martha Wells
A security robot hacks its own governor module, gains free will, and spends its days streaming soap operas instead of killing anyone.
#3 Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
A high-school teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there and one job left: save Earth.
#4 Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he isn't who the House says he is.
#5 Circe
Madeline Miller
An exiled witch on a deserted island turns men into pigs and spends three thousand years deciding what she actually wants.
#6 The Martian
Andy Weir
A botanist gets left for dead on Mars and has to grow food on a planet that wants him gone, one duct-taped fix at a time.
#7 The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Patroclus follows Achilles into the Trojan War, narrating the years it takes to watch the boy he loves become the killer a prophecy always promised.
#8 The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A woman searches a dying continent for the daughter her husband stole, while the world ends again on schedule.
#9 The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
A suicidal woman finds a library between life and death where every book is a different version of the life she could have lived.
#10 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener, a burglar's heir, and seven others walk a piece of jewelry to a volcano because destroying it is the only way to stop a war.
#11 The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
In Nazi Germany, a girl who can barely read steals books from bonfires and burglarized shelves while Death keeps count of who dies next on her street.
#12 Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
A street thief gets recruited into a heist crew plotting to overthrow a god-emperor who has ruled unchallenged for a thousand years.
#13 Dune
Frank Herbert
A duke's son survives his family's betrayal on a desert planet and becomes the prophet who leads its people to war.
#14 The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
A farm boy's village burns in one night, and the Aes Sedai who saves him says the Dark One marked him before he could walk.
#15 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
A ragtag crew takes a multi-year tunneling job to punch a wormhole through space and mostly just has to get along with each other for the ride.
#16 A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Four friends build lives together in New York while one of them quietly refuses to let anyone near his own past.
#17 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A suicidal bridge slave assigned to the war camp's deadliest crew starts hearing storms answer when he gives orders.
#18 The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien
A burglar with no interest in adventure gets talked into robbing a dragon by a wizard who never quite explains the plan.
#19 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams
Earth gets demolished for a hyperspace bypass minutes after a man's house is demolished for a road, and his best friend turns out to be an alien with a towel.
#20 The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid
A reclusive Old Hollywood starlet finally tells a nobody magazine writer the truth about her seven marriages, and why she picked her.
#21 A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
A Russian count is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in a Moscow hotel, and builds a whole world inside it.
#22 The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A framed sailor rots in an island prison for fourteen years, escapes with a fortune, and spends the rest of the book collecting on every debt of vengeance.
#23 The Name of the Wind
Patrick Rothfuss
An orphaned actor's son claws his way toward becoming a legend by the University's fire-and-sympathy magic — a story stuck at book two for over a decade.
#24 A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
A suicidal widower's rigid daily routine gets derailed by new neighbors who can't back a trailer into a parking space.
#25 Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
A man with a low IQ undergoes surgery that turns him into a genius, and has to watch the intelligence, and everyone's honesty, fade back out.