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.

439

Books indexed

161,536

Tracked mentions in 2021

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.

4,227 in 2021

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.

4,211 in 2021

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.

4,188 in 2021

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.

4,056 in 2021

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.

3,889 in 2021

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.

3,632 in 2021

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Sarah J. Maas

Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, gets dragged into the faerie lands as payment, and spends five books choosing a court.

3,432 in 2021

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.

3,145 in 2021

The House in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune

A caseworker is sent to inspect an orphanage of six dangerous magical children, one of them the literal Antichrist, and has to decide whether to file the report that shuts it down.

2,983 in 2021

#10

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.

2,858 in 2021

#11

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo

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

2,854 in 2021

#12

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.

2,731 in 2021

#13

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.

2,680 in 2021

#14

All Systems Red (The Murderbot Diaries)

Martha Wells

A security android with no interest in gender, romance, or heroics just wants to watch its shows, and ends up saving its clients from a conspiracy anyway.

2,664 in 2021

#15

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.

2,467 in 2021

#16

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.

2,455 in 2021

#17

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller

Patroclus, exiled and overlooked, grows up shadowing Achilles and follows him to Troy already knowing how the war ends for them.

2,378 in 2021

#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.

2,334 in 2021

#19

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.

2,227 in 2021

#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.

2,157 in 2021

#21

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

A teenage girl volunteers to fight to the death on live television in place of her younger sister, then spends three books resisting everyone who wants to make her a symbol.

2,117 in 2021