r/TrueLit · 2022

Most-mentioned books in r/TrueLit during 2022

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/TrueLit within the published source unit for 2022. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

116

Books ranked

2,410

Tracked mentions in 2022

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

203 in 2022

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.

192 in 2022

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.

138 in 2022

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.

133 in 2022

Ulysses

James Joyce

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

120 in 2022

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.

96 in 2022

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.

96 in 2022

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.

90 in 2022

Gardens of the Moon

Steven Erikson

A continent-spanning empire's mage-soldiers besiege a city that might already be doomed by gods playing a board game with human pieces.

69 in 2022

#10

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.

67 in 2022

#11

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.

63 in 2022

#12

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.

51 in 2022

#13

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.

45 in 2022

#14

Beloved

Toni Morrison

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

44 in 2022

#15

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë

A plain, broke governess tells off the man she loves in one paragraph, and Reddit has been rereading that paragraph at every age since.

43 in 2022

#16

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he used to have a different name.

43 in 2022

#17

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.

42 in 2022

#18

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.

41 in 2022

#19

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.

40 in 2022

#20

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.

39 in 2022

#21

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.

36 in 2022