A Scanner Darkly
1977 · 289 pages
An undercover narcotics agent is assigned to watch a suspect who is himself, and the drug splitting his brain hemispheres keeps him from noticing. Dick closes by naming the friends he lost.
★ 5.2
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Neuromancer
1984 · 276 pages
Case, a burned-out hacker in Chiba City, has his nervous system rebuilt in exchange for one last job. Gibson gave cyberspace its look and its slang, and programmers spent decades building toward it.
★ 5.3
Atlas Shrugged
1957 · 1200 pages
The people who keep the world running go on strike. Dagny Taggart holds her railroad together as the competent vanish, and Rand's case that selfishness is a virtue still powers American libertarianism.
★ 5.5
Ubik
1969 · 227 pages
Dick's most vertiginous novel. After a bomb on the Moon, Joe Chip's world rots and slides back toward 1939, and nobody can say who died. An aerosol called Ubik holds it off.
★ 5.8
A Clockwork Orange
1962 · 357 pages
Alex is fifteen and narrates his nights of assault in Nadsat, a slang welded from Russian and Cockney. The state conditions the violence out of him, and Burgess asks whether forced goodness counts.
★ 6.3
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
1968 · 244 pages
Rick Deckard hunts androids across a San Francisco emptied by fallout, separating them from people with a test for empathy. At home he keeps an electric sheep and is humiliated by it.
★ 6.4
We
1924 · 225 pages
Numbered citizens live in glass apartments under a Table of Hours, and the engineer D-503 records his own unraveling. Banned in Russia until 1988, it gave Orwell his model for Nineteen Eighty-Four.
★ 6.6
The Man in the High Castle
1962 · 274 pages
Fifteen years after the Axis won, dealers in Japanese-occupied San Francisco sell forged Americana to the conquerors. Dick's people consult the I Ching and pass around a novel where the Allies won.
★ 6.6
Fahrenheit 451
1953 · 256 pages
Montag burns books for a living until a neighbor's questions and a woman who chooses to burn with her library break him open. Bradbury's target is a public that stopped wanting to read.
★ 6.8
The Handmaid's Tale
1985 · 336 pages
In the theocracy that replaced the United States, fertile women are assigned to powerful men to bear their children. Atwood put nothing in it that had not already happened somewhere.
★ 7.7
Lord of the Flies
1954 · 192 pages
English schoolboys are marooned on an island without adults, hold a vote, and are soon hunting each other. Golding tells it so plainly that you believe every step of the descent.
★ 7.8
Brave New World
1932 · 281 pages
Babies are decanted from bottles into castes, everyone takes a drug called soma, and nobody is unhappy. Huxley saw that a tyranny of pleasure would hold better than one of fear.
★ 8.5
1984
1949 · 328 pages
Winston Smith rewrites old newspapers so history agrees with the Party, then risks a diary and a love affair. Orwell built the machinery so exactly that reading it feels like being watched.
★ 9.1
The Trial
1915 · 276 pages
Josef K. is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ruined by his own efforts to clear himself. Kafka made faceless authority funny, and gave the century its word for dread.
★ 9.2