Blood Meridian
1985 · 337 pages
Scalp hunters ride the Mexican border in 1849, among them a runaway Tennessee boy and the hairless giant Judge Holden. McCarthy writes the violence in Old Testament prose and never once looks away.
★ 9.1
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1985
Showing 12 books from 1985
Love in the Time of Cholera
1985 · 348 pages
Turned down as a young man, Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for the woman he loves to be widowed. García Márquez makes old age more erotic than youth.
★ 8.4
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
Lonesome Dove
1985 · 858 pages
Two aging Texas Rangers drive cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana, one talking constantly and one saying nothing. McMurtry gives the whole crew interior lives, then lets the trail take them.
★ 6.9
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
1985 · 184 pages
Orwell feared censors, Postman writes, but Huxley feared an audience too amused to care. Television has turned news and politics into show business, and every argument about screens since has borrowed his terms.
★ 6.8
QED
The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
1985 · 192 pages
Why does a pane of glass reflect some of the light striking it? Feynman answers with arrows on paper and not one equation, handing quantum electrodynamics whole to readers who never took physics.
★ 6.7
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
1985 · 400 pages
Two stories alternate: a man who encrypts data inside his mind, and a newcomer to a walled town reading dreams from unicorn skulls. Murakami has been returning to that architecture for forty years.
★ 6.4
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
1985 · 256 pages
A music teacher reaches for his wife's head, mistaking it for his hat. Sacks gives twenty-four such patients whole inner lives, more curious about what their minds built than what was lost.
★ 5.7
Ender's Game
1985 · 256 pages
Six-year-old Ender Wiggin is taken to a school in orbit, isolated on purpose, and made into a commander by zero-gravity war games. The Marine Corps keeps it on its professional reading list.
★ 5.5
In the American West
1985 · 174 pages
Avedon spent five years photographing drifters, miners, waitresses, and slaughterhouse workers against plain white paper. Printed larger than life, the faces leave nothing to hide behind and no cowboy myth standing.
★ 4.9
Wiseguy
Life in a Mafia Family
1985 · 304 pages
Henry Hill spent twenty-five years as a Lucchese associate, from stolen cigarettes to the Lufthansa robbery, and Pileggi lets him tell it himself. Scorsese lifted whole scenes of Goodfellas straight from it.
★ 4.9
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
1985 · 32 pages
Give the mouse a cookie and he wants milk, then a straw, then a mirror to check his milk mustache. Numeroff taught four decades of children how one small yes becomes an afternoon.
★ 4.4