Year in review

Most-mentioned Reddit books of 2019

Ranked by tracked monthly mention totals within the published source units for 2019. Some source units are bounded samples; for a community-specific ordering, use that subreddit's year page.

402

Books indexed

99,752

Tracked mentions in 2019

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson

A street thief who can swallow metal and burn it for power gets recruited into a heist crew whose actual target is the immortal emperor who's ruled for a thousand years.

3,563 in 2019

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.

3,411 in 2019

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.

3,264 in 2019

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.

3,068 in 2019

The Eye of the World

Robert Jordan

Trollocs burn a village hunting for one of three farm boys, so an Aes Sedai spirits all three out before anyone learns which.

2,972 in 2019

The Name of the Wind

Patrick Rothfuss

A legendary hero narrates his own rise from orphaned street kid to feared arcanist over three days, except Rothfuss never wrote day three.

2,551 in 2019

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.

2,341 in 2019

A Game of Thrones

George R. R. Martin

Ned Stark's family gets pulled into a succession war for the Iron Throne while an unkillable winter creeps south.

2,278 in 2019

The Blade Itself

Joe Abercrombie

A crippled torturer, a vain swordsman, and a berserker haunted by his own alter ego get pulled into a war none of them understand yet.

2,134 in 2019

#10

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.

1,927 in 2019

#11

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.

1,493 in 2019

#12

Storm Front (The Dresden Files)

Jim Butcher

Chicago's only professional wizard takes a case involving black magic and a mob boss, with a police captain who wants it solved fast or him gone.

1,460 in 2019

#13

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin

A proud boy on a poor island learns real magic, casts one spell out of arrogance, and spends the rest of the book hunted by what it let loose.

1,424 in 2019

#14

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin

An orogene comes home to find her son beaten to death and her daughter gone, the same day a continent starts splitting apart.

1,375 in 2019

#15

Hyperion

Dan Simmons

Seven pilgrims travel together to a planet that kills, each one carrying the private story of why they volunteered to go.

1,338 in 2019

#16

Ender's Game

Orson Scott Card

A child prodigy recruited into Battle School at six ends up commanding real war fleets, believing until the end that it's all just a simulation.

1,314 in 2019

#17

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo

Kaz Brekker recruits five other criminal teenagers for a heist inside a supposedly impenetrable ice fortress.

1,288 in 2019

#18

Assassin's Apprentice

Robin Hobb

A royal bastard trains as the king's poisoner and assassin, and readers fifteen books later still call the ending emotionally devastating.

1,276 in 2019

#19

The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien

A hobbit who has never left his own pantry gets recruited by thirteen dwarves and a wizard to steal treasure back from a dragon.

1,267 in 2019

#20

The Martian

Andy Weir

A botanist gets left for dead on Mars after a dust storm and has to grow his own food to survive until the next mission arrives, years later.

1,188 in 2019

#21

American Gods

Neil Gaiman

Gods who crossed the ocean with their immigrant worshippers are going extinct in modern America, replaced by whatever people actually worship now.

1,180 in 2019

#22

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Scott Lynch

A conman runs cons on the nobility of a canal city built from alchemical glass, until a rival gang decides to burn his crew down to the ground.

1,118 in 2019

#23

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams

Earth gets demolished to build a hyperspace bypass, and the last man alive escapes only because an alien researching a galactic encyclopedia needed an assistant.

1,114 in 2019

#24

Circe

Madeline Miller

Exiled to an empty island for turning a rival into a monster, a minor goddess spends immortality perfecting the one power the gods never bothered to master.

1,062 in 2019