r/TrueLit · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/TrueLit during 2021

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/TrueLit within the published source unit for 2021. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

101

Books ranked

1,455

Tracked mentions in 2021

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

133 in 2021

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.

108 in 2021

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.

91 in 2021

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.

78 in 2021

Middlemarch

George Eliot

Dorothea marries a dry, much older scholar hoping to matter through his work, and Middlemarch spends eight hundred pages showing her exactly how that plan fails.

73 in 2021

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.

65 in 2021

Ulysses

James Joyce

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

57 in 2021

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.

44 in 2021

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.

34 in 2021

#10

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.

31 in 2021

#11

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.

30 in 2021

#12

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

Four college friends move to New York to build lives together, and one of them never stops paying for what happened to him before the book began.

29 in 2021

#13

Dune

Frank Herbert

Paul Atreides survives his family's massacre on a desert planet and becomes the messiah the empire engineered him to be, then has to live with it.

29 in 2021

#14

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.

29 in 2021

#15

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.

29 in 2021

#16

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.

27 in 2021

#17

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.

25 in 2021

#18

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.

25 in 2021

#19

Beloved

Toni Morrison

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

23 in 2021

#20

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.

23 in 2021

#21

Stoner

John Williams

An unremarkable Missouri professor loses his marriage, his ambitions, and most of his arguments, and the novel insists that still adds up to a life.

22 in 2021

#22

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

A falsely imprisoned sailor spends fourteen years in a fortress, learns of a hidden fortune, and returns to make sure everyone who wronged him pays for it.

21 in 2021