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.
#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.
#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 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.
#4 Ulysses
James Joyce
A reader gets twenty pages into Ulysses, realizes they understood none of it, and starts over from page one.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#12 Beloved
Toni Morrison
A formerly enslaved woman confronts the ghost of the daughter she killed to keep her out of slavery.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.
#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.