r/TrueLit · 2025

Most-mentioned books in r/TrueLit during 2025

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/TrueLit within the published source unit for 2025. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

102

Books ranked

1,085

Tracked mentions in 2025

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

100 in 2025

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.

87 in 2025

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.

57 in 2025

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.

49 in 2025

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.

42 in 2025

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.

40 in 2025

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.

39 in 2025

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.

33 in 2025

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.

33 in 2025

#10

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.

31 in 2025

#11

Ulysses

James Joyce

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

31 in 2025

#12

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.

26 in 2025

#13

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 2025

#14

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.

24 in 2025

#15

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.

24 in 2025

#16

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.

23 in 2025

#17

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 2025

#18

Beloved

Toni Morrison

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

21 in 2025

#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.

21 in 2025

#20

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.

16 in 2025

#21

Kafka on the Shore

Haruki Murakami

A fifteen-year-old runs from his father's prophecy while fish fall from the sky and an old man who talks to cats searches Tokyo for one missing tabby.

13 in 2025