r/suggestmeabook · 2023
Top books in r/suggestmeabook during 2023
Ranked by mentions in r/suggestmeabook threads dated 2023. Useful for spotting what r/suggestmeabook was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 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.
#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 East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Two families retrace Cain and Abel across three generations in California's Salinas Valley, and one brother begs God to make him good.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Two aging Texas Rangers drive a stolen cattle herd a thousand miles north, hauling four decades of friendship and regret with them.
#7 Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
An Appalachian foster kid narrates his own life from birth through the opioid epidemic, and dares you to call it fiction.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A miner's son fakes his way into the ruling class's brutal war-games academy to bring down the system that executed his wife.
#12 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.
#13 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.
#14 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.
#15 Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet spends five sisters, one entailed estate, and one insufferably proud man learning she judged him wrong.
#16 11/22/63
Stephen King
A substitute teacher steps through a diner pantry into 1958 with one job: stop Lee Harvey Oswald before Dallas.
#17 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.
#18 Circe
Madeline Miller
An exiled witch on a deserted island turns men into pigs and spends three thousand years deciding what she actually wants.
#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 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.
#21 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.
#22 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.
#23 To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
A small-town Alabama lawyer defends a Black man falsely accused of rape while his children watch the town's conscience get tested.
#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 Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
A teenage runaway joins a scalp-hunting gang across the borderlands, shadowed by a hairless giant who never loses an argument.