ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The 100 best books of all time

This is ReadingRate's ranked list of the 100 best books ever written, from Hamlet to the great novels of the last century. It is built on literary-regard data — canonical status, critical acclaim, and influence — rather than user star ratings, and every book on it carries a difficulty score so you can tell which of the greats you can actually read next.

Any best-books list is an argument. Ours is at least a stated one: the ranking leans on measurable literary regard rather than votes, which is why it looks more like a university reading list than a bestseller chart. Each entry links to a full page with nine-dimension difficulty scoring, length, and reading-time estimates.

1–10

  1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1601, difficulty 6.7/10)
  2. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1320, difficulty 6.7/10)
  3. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922, difficulty 8.9/10)
  4. Iliad by Homer (-750, difficulty 5.6/10)
  5. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, difficulty 5.8/10)
  6. King James Bible by Anonymous (1611, difficulty 6.0/10)
  7. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913, difficulty 7.1/10)
  8. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869, difficulty 5.3/10)
  9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967, difficulty 5.5/10)
  10. King Lear by William Shakespeare (1606, difficulty 7.3/10)

11–20

  1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871, difficulty 5.4/10)
  2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851, difficulty 7.1/10)
  3. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922, difficulty 9.2/10)
  4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866, difficulty 7.0/10)
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880, difficulty 6.7/10)
  6. Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667, difficulty 6.9/10)
  7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857, difficulty 7.1/10)
  8. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830, difficulty 6.4/10)
  9. 1984 by George Orwell (1949, difficulty 4.6/10)
  10. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915, difficulty 4.7/10)

21–30

  1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10)
  2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929, difficulty 8.0/10)
  3. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (-429, difficulty 6.1/10)
  4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813, difficulty 5.2/10)
  5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, difficulty 5.2/10)
  6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953, difficulty 7.5/10)
  7. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832, difficulty 6.9/10)
  8. Aeneid by Virgil (-19, difficulty 6.3/10)
  9. Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1791, difficulty 7.8/10)
  10. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400, difficulty 6.0/10)

31–40

  1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884, difficulty 5.2/10)
  2. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (1010, difficulty 6.3/10)
  3. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958, difficulty 4.5/10)
  4. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953, difficulty 7.4/10)
  5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861, difficulty 5.0/10)
  6. The Prelude by William Wordsworth (1850, difficulty 5.6/10)
  7. Complete Poems by John Keats (1820, difficulty 5.6/10)
  8. Masnavi by Rumi (1273, difficulty 6.4/10)
  9. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924, difficulty 6.3/10)
  10. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862, difficulty 6.4/10)

41–50

  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.9/10)
  2. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942, difficulty 6.4/10)
  3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847, difficulty 5.4/10)
  4. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904, difficulty 5.0/10)
  5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847, difficulty 7.3/10)
  6. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899, difficulty 6.9/10)
  7. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (180, difficulty 4.1/10)
  8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926, difficulty 5.6/10)
  9. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855, difficulty 5.3/10)
  10. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944, difficulty 6.1/10)

51–60

  1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842, difficulty 5.5/10)
  2. Analects by Confucius (-479, difficulty 5.1/10)
  3. Tao Te Ching by Laozi (-400, difficulty 6.4/10)
  4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818, difficulty 6.8/10)
  5. Metamorphoses by Ovid (8, difficulty 7.8/10)
  6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955, difficulty 6.9/10)
  7. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981, difficulty 6.7/10)
  8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985, difficulty 7.0/10)
  9. The Bacchae by Euripides (-405, difficulty 4.6/10)
  10. Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous (-2100, difficulty 4.8/10)

61–70

  1. Oresteia by Aeschylus (-458, difficulty 6.4/10)
  2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939, difficulty 5.5/10)
  3. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (1944, difficulty 5.4/10)
  4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972, difficulty 6.2/10)
  5. Mahabharata by Vyasa (-400, difficulty 6.6/10)
  6. Ramayana by Valmiki (-500, difficulty 5.4/10)
  7. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969, difficulty 6.3/10)
  8. The Tower by William Butler Yeats (1928, difficulty 5.6/10)
  9. Candide by Voltaire (1759, difficulty 6.2/10)
  10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932, difficulty 5.2/10)

71–80

  1. Beowulf by Anonymous (1000, difficulty 5.8/10)
  2. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973, difficulty 6.3/10)
  3. The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (1921, difficulty 3.8/10)
  4. Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956, difficulty 5.3/10)
  5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974, difficulty 8.4/10)
  6. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1879, difficulty 5.1/10)
  7. Essays: First and Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844, difficulty 5.6/10)
  8. Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580, difficulty 4.8/10)
  9. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982, difficulty 8.1/10)
  10. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (1914, difficulty 4.1/10)

81–90

  1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850, difficulty 7.2/10)
  2. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985, difficulty 6.5/10)
  3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, difficulty 8.1/10)
  4. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954, difficulty 4.9/10)
  5. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (2003, difficulty 6.3/10)
  6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004, difficulty 7.5/10)
  7. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001, difficulty 7.4/10)
  8. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726, difficulty 6.6/10)
  9. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, difficulty 5.4/10)
  10. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353, difficulty 4.7/10)

91–100

  1. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835, difficulty 5.5/10)
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961, difficulty 4.2/10)
  3. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924, difficulty 5.4/10)
  4. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10)
  5. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959, difficulty 7.3/10)
  6. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719, difficulty 3.7/10)
  7. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (1943, difficulty 6.5/10)
  8. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962, difficulty 5.4/10)
  9. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10)
  10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854, difficulty 5.8/10)

Questions people actually ask

What are the best books of all time?
By literary regard — canonical status, critical acclaim, and influence — the top of the list runs to works like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ulysses, War and Peace, and The Divine Comedy. ReadingRate ranks 100 such works, each with difficulty and reading-time data.
How is this list ranked?
On literary-regard data: how canonically established a work is, its critical standing, and its influence on later writing. It is not a readers' poll, which is why recent bestsellers don't appear.
Are these books hard to read?
Many are, and the list says so instead of pretending otherwise. Every entry carries a difficulty score out of 100 across nine dimensions, so you can pick a great book at a difficulty you'll actually finish.
Where should I start with the classics?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. Sort for acclaimed books scored as accessible — Pride and Prejudice reads far more easily than Ulysses — and work upward as your comfort grows. That's what the difficulty scores on this list are for.