r/TrueLit · 2023
Most-mentioned books in r/TrueLit during 2023
This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/TrueLit within the published source unit for 2023. 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 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 Ulysses
James Joyce
A reader gets twenty pages into Ulysses, realizes they understood none of it, and starts over from page one.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 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.
#7 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#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.
#11 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.
#12 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.
#13 Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he used to have a different name.
#14 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.
#15 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.
#16 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.
#17 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.
#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.
#19 Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Two retired Texas Rangers drive a stolen cattle herd from the Rio Grande to Montana, and half of them don't make it back.
#20 Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Three friends grow up in a quiet English boarding school where everything is normal except the one thing nobody explains to them.
#21 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.
#22 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.
#23 Beloved
Toni Morrison
A formerly enslaved woman confronts the ghost of the daughter she killed to keep her out of slavery.
#24 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.
#25 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A bridgeman slave carries spears through a warzone he's not allowed to fight in, until he decides to become the soldier no one will follow.