John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now

Tagged fiction · everything

25 Best Books of All Time

A rundown that pits centuries-old canon against pulpy favorites and openly acknowledges its own snubs, ranking works from Nineteen Eighty-Four and Dracula down through pop staples like Infinite Jest, A Storm of Swords, and Hitchhiker's Guide. It's notable for slipping in two nonfiction picks—Empire of Pain on the Sackler opioid scandal and Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, the basis for Goodfellas—alongside the usual literary heavyweights, treating them as equally worthy "books" rather than a lesser category. Worth keeping for its blunt, personal-taste-driven commentary rather than a consensus-driven list.

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The 14 best dystopian novels of all time

A rundown roster of essential dystopian fiction, framed by The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel The Testaments as touchstones, tracing the genre from Zamyatin's We and Kafka's The Trial through Cold War-era and postmodern entries to recent works like Station Eleven, Submission and Little Eyes. Each brief entry sketches the premise and argues for why the book endures or unsettles, whether through Ballard's collapsing tower block, McCarthy's scorched-earth father-son journey, or Alderman's gender-power reversal. Worth keeping as a ready-made syllabus of the genre's key preoccupations — totalitarianism, technology, ecological collapse, and patriarchy — spanning a century of imagined catastrophe.

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