What fantasy books and authors are we talking about the most?
Reddit User einsiboy, creator of the TopRedditBooks site, recently posted a list of the Top 100 Fantasy Books discussed on Reddit in the past year. The information is compiled from 2018 – 2019, based on comments in the subreddit r/books, and uses number of mentions plus comment scores to balance out the data.
Therefore, the list skews more towards popular fantasy books of the last few years, with a handful of classics claiming some spots as well. Individual books from prolific and well-known fantasy authors on the list dominate the list, so there’s a lot from:
- Neil Gaiman
- N.K. Jemisin
- George R. R. Martin
- V.E. Schwab
- Brandon Sanderson
- Sarah J. Maas
- Scott Lynch
- J.K. Rowling
- Katherine Arden
- Joe Abercrombie
- Leigh Bardugo
- Steven Erikson
- Robin Hobb
- Patrick Rothfuss
- Naomi Novik
- …and Tolkien
Which one could well expect. What’s interesting, though, are the new or standalone titles that manage to find their way into the discourse (or, The Discourse).
When grouped together, they comprise a really interesting recommended reading list!
- Circe and The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
- Saga Vol. 1 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
- Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
- Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
- The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins
- The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
- Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
- The City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty
- The Black Tides of Heaven by JY Yang
- Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James
- Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse
- The Gray House by Mariam Petrosyan
There’s a lot of range in there, from mythology retellings to muscular sword epics to prairie fantasy to literary character dramas and even on to space opera. We see fantasies in there with a wide variety of cultural origins, too.
And that’s just a starting point!
