Year in review
Most-mentioned Reddit books of 2021
Ranked by tracked monthly mention totals within the published source units for 2021. Some source units are bounded samples; for a community-specific ordering, use that subreddit's year page.
#1 Dune
Frank Herbert
A duke's son survives his family's betrayal on a desert planet and becomes the prophet who leads its people to war.
#2 All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)
Martha Wells
A security robot hacks its own governor module, gains free will, and spends its days streaming soap operas instead of killing anyone.
#3 Hyperion
Dan Simmons
Seven pilgrims journey toward a monster that grants one wish and kills everyone else, and each tells the story of why they came.
#4 The Eye of the World
Robert Jordan
A farm boy's village burns in one night, and the Aes Sedai who saves him says the Dark One marked him before he could walk.
#5 Gardens of the Moon
Steven Erikson
An empire quietly marks its own soldiers for death, and the gods are already choosing sides before the Bridgeburners find out.
#6 Blindsight
Peter Watts
A crew of post-human specialists meets first contact and reports back that consciousness might be what's holding humanity back.
#7 Children of Time
Adrian Tchaikovsky
A terraforming experiment goes wrong, a nanovirus lands on spiders instead of monkeys, and evolution builds a civilization nobody planned for.
#8 The Way of Kings
Brandon Sanderson
A suicidal bridge slave assigned to the war camp's deadliest crew starts hearing storms answer when he gives orders.
#9 The Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
A gardener, a burglar's heir, and seven others walk a piece of jewelry to a volcano because destroying it is the only way to stop a war.
#10 The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A woman searches a dying continent for the daughter her husband stole, while the world ends again on schedule.
#11 Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
A high-school teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there and one job left: save Earth.
#12 Mistborn: The Final Empire
Brandon Sanderson
A street thief gets recruited into a heist crew plotting to overthrow a god-emperor who has ruled unchallenged for a thousand years.
#13 A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin
A direwolf litter found beside a dead stag opens a decades-spanning war for the Iron Throne with no guaranteed survivors.
#14 The Martian
Andy Weir
A botanist gets left for dead on Mars and has to grow food on a planet that wants him gone, one duct-taped fix at a time.
#15 Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
A man alone in an endless house of statues and tides slowly realizes he isn't who the House says he is.
#16 The Blade Itself
Joe Abercrombie
Nine-Fingers the barbarian just wants to survive one more winter, but a torturer's investigation and a prince's war have other plans.
#17 The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
An envoy is sent alone to a planet where everyone is genderless most of the month, and he has to unlearn who he assumes is in charge.
#18 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling
A neglected eleven-year-old discovers he belongs to a hidden magical world, enters Hogwarts, and learns that wonder carries history and danger with it.
#19 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
A ragtag crew takes a multi-year tunneling job to punch a wormhole through space and mostly just has to get along with each other for the ride.
#20 Red Rising
Pierce Brown
A miner's son fakes his way into the ruling class's brutal war-games academy to bring down the system that executed his wife.
#21 A Wizard of Earthsea
Ursula K. Le Guin
A prideful young mage summons a nameless shadow to prove his power, then spends years learning to face it instead of running.
#22 Neuromancer
William Gibson
A burned-out hacker banned from cyberspace takes one last job to breach the AI that might already own a piece of him.
#23 Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
A six-year-old is drafted into a war academy that trains him to command a fleet, and he doesn't find out what he actually did until it's over.
#24 The Three-Body Problem
Liu Cixin
A Chinese radio astronomer's decades-old reply to an alien signal puts Earth on a collision course with an invasion fleet centuries out.