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.

119

Books ranked

1,389

Tracked mentions in 2023

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.

136 in 2023

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.

101 in 2023

Ulysses

James Joyce

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

98 in 2023

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.

78 in 2023

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.

76 in 2023

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.

51 in 2023

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.

47 in 2023

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.

41 in 2023

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.

40 in 2023

#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.

39 in 2023

#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.

33 in 2023

#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.

31 in 2023

#13

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

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

28 in 2023

#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.

28 in 2023

#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.

26 in 2023

#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.

23 in 2023

#17

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.

21 in 2023

#18

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.

20 in 2023