The Unbearable Lightness of Being
1984 · 320 pages
Kundera puts a Prague surgeon who cannot stop having affairs, the woman who loves him, and the Soviet tanks of 1968 together, then asks whether a life lived once can weigh anything.
★ 7.7
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1984
Showing 10 books from 1984
The Lover
1984 · 117 pages
Crossing the Mekong by ferry in 1929, a French girl of fifteen meets the Chinese man who becomes her lover. Duras writes it in fragments that refuse both romance and pity.
★ 6.8
Money
A Suicide Note
1984 · 368 pages
John Self drinks and spends himself toward ruin between London and New York while his first film falls apart. Amis gave the decade's greed a voice English comic fiction spent years imitating.
★ 6.4
Flaubert's Parrot
1984 · 190 pages
Barnes sends a retired English doctor after the stuffed parrot once on Flaubert's desk. The search becomes chronologies, a bestiary, a mock exam, and under all of it the doctor's dead wife.
★ 5.4
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
Sister Outsider
Essays and Speeches
1984 · 190 pages
At a 1979 feminist conference that had sidelined Black and lesbian women, Lorde said the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. These essays turn anger and difference into working instruments.
★ 5.3
Killings
1984 · 320 pages
One killing per chapter, in towns no reporter usually visits, including a Kentucky landowner who shot a documentary filmmaker for trespassing. Trillin cares how these Americans lived, not how they died.
★ 4.7
Hackers
1984 · 659 pages
Levy found the hacker ethic among MIT students who monopolized the university's computers all night: all information should be free, mistrust authority, judge a person by the code. Silicon Valley still recites it.
★ 4.7
A Field Guide to American Houses
1984 · 880 pages
Every American house is a set of clues: roof pitch, window shape, porch depth. McAlester supplies the vocabulary, from Georgian mansions to postwar ranches, and you walk out able to name your street.
★ 4.5
The Eye of the Wolf
1984 · 128 pages
A boy called Africa stares into the wolf's cage and will not leave. The one-eyed wolf gives in, and each reads a whole life in the other's eye: Alaska's snow, then the deserts.
★ 4.5