25 Best Books of All Time
Collider's list ranks twenty-five essential reads across centuries and genres, balancing canonical heavyweights, modern nonfiction, and popular crowd-pleasers while admitting inevitable snubs and personal picks. Highlights include classic dystopia [[Nineteen Eighty-Four]], Gothic horror [[Dracula]], doomed romance [[Wuthering Heights]], investigative exposé [[Empire of Pain]], controversial modernist [[Lolita]], epic fantasy [[A Storm of Swords]], sprawling postmodern novel [[Infinite Jest]], and comic science fiction [[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]. The piece explains why these works endure—their cultural influence, narrative daring, and emotional power—while defending inclusion of both literary art and entertaining serials, and it invites readers to disagree with gusto. It covers a range from nineteenth-century serials to contemporary investigative journalism and welcomes debate about what counts as 'great'.