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r/TrueLit · 2019

Most-mentioned books in r/TrueLit during 2019

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/TrueLit within the published source unit for 2019. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

23
Books ranked
42
Tracked mentions in 2019
Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions
Cover of Blood Meridian #1

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.

8 in 2019
Cover of House of Leaves #2

House of Leaves

Mark Z. Danielewski

A found manuscript describes a house whose hallway is bigger inside than the house itself, and its footnotes start unraveling the man reading them.

3 in 2019
Cover of Moby-Dick #3

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

A whaling captain drags his crew across the world's oceans chasing the one whale that took his leg, and nothing else matters to him.

3 in 2019
Cover of Ulysses #4

Ulysses

James Joyce

A reader gets twenty pages into Ulysses, realizes they understood none of it, and starts over from page one.

3 in 2019
Cover of Circe #5

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.

2 in 2019
Cover of East of Eden #6

East of Eden

John Steinbeck

A California farming family reenacts Cain and Abel across two generations, and Reddit keeps calling it the classic that isn't actually a slog.

2 in 2019
Cover of The Magic Mountain #7

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

A young engineer visits his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for three weeks and stays seven years, arguing reason against everything reason can't explain.

2 in 2019
Cover of The Master and Margarita #8

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

The devil arrives in 1930s Moscow with a talking cat and a magic show, and the story keeps detouring into Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem.

2 in 2019
Cover of The Remains of the Day #9

The Remains of the Day

Kazuo Ishiguro

An English butler spends his one vacation reviewing thirty years of service and realizing, too late, what proper restraint cost him.

2 in 2019
Cover of The Road #10

The Road

Cormac McCarthy

A father and son push a shopping cart down a dead American highway, and the only rule left is that they're the good guys.

2 in 2019
Cover of Anna Karenina #11

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

A married Russian aristocrat's affair collapses her life, and two hundred pages in, you're somehow still reading her brother-in-law's opinions on wheat farming.

1 in 2019
Cover of Beloved #12

Beloved

Toni Morrison

A formerly enslaved woman confronts the ghost of the daughter she killed to keep her out of slavery.

1 in 2019
Cover of Catch-22 #13

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

A WWII bombardier tries to get grounded for insanity, only to learn that wanting out of combat proves he's sane enough to keep flying it.

1 in 2019
Cover of Crime and Punishment #14

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A destitute former student murders a pawnbroker to test his own theory that some men are above the law, then can't stop thinking about it.

1 in 2019
Cover of Neuromancer #15

Neuromancer

William Gibson

A washed-up hacker gets his nervous system rebuilt for one last job, in a world Gibson invented before the internet existed to copy it.

1 in 2019
Cover of One Hundred Years of Solitude #16

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez

A colonel facing a firing squad remembers the day his father showed him ice, one scene in a hundred years of a family that keeps repeating its own names.

1 in 2019
Cover of Pride and Prejudice #17

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.

1 in 2019
Cover of Slaughterhouse-Five #18

Slaughterhouse-Five

Kurt Vonnegut

Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, bouncing between a WWII POW camp, a Tralfamadorian zoo, and his own suburban optometry practice, all at once.

1 in 2019
Cover of Spinning Silver #19

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.

1 in 2019
Cover of The Brothers Karamazov #20

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Three brothers, a murdered father, and a murder trial become the frame Dostoevsky uses to argue about God, guilt, and free will for nearly a thousand pages.

1 in 2019
Cover of The Dispossessed #21

The Dispossessed

Ursula K. Le Guin

A physicist from an anarchist moon travels to the capitalist planet his people fled, carrying a theory of time that could unite both worlds or arm one of them.

1 in 2019
Cover of The Secret History #22

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

A group of classics students at a small Vermont college kills one of their own, and the entire novel is spent explaining, calmly, exactly why.

1 in 2019
Cover of To the Lighthouse #23

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

A family keeps promising a small boy a boat trip across the bay to the lighthouse, and then a decade and a world war get in the way.

1 in 2019