The 100 best moderately difficult books about art and creativity

No. 11 on this list. Venus and Adonis · William Shakespeare · 1593

Shakespeare's first published work (1593), personally overseen and dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, went through more than a dozen editions in his lifetime — making it the most reprinted English poem of the Elizabethan era. It appears on virtually all Renaissance literature and Shakespeare syllabi and features in every serious account of early modern English poetry.

No. 12 on this list. Songs of Innocence and of Experience · William Blake · 1794

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Blake etched, printed, and hand-colored each plate himself, fusing lyric poetry with visual art in a form no one had attempted before. The paired "Lamb" and "Tyger" compress an entire theology into forty-four lines: innocence asks who made you; experience asks how dare He.

No. 13 on this list. Shakuntala · Kalidasa · 400

Supreme Sanskrit drama; first Indian text to reach European audience.

No. 14 on this list. Amores · Ovid · c. 16 BCE

Ovid is twenty years old and Corinna will not open her door. So begins the Amores — forty-nine love elegies written in the 20s BCE by a Roman poet who understood, from the first poem, that wit is more powerful than sincerity. Cupid, he explains in Elegy I, stole a foot from his heroic hexameter and turned his epic into love poetry against his will. This is Ovid's characteristic move: mock complaint that reveals total mastery. The Amores catalogues an affair with the unnamed mistress Corinna — bribing her doorkeeper, watching her comb her ruined hair, mourning her parrot with the same hyperbolic grief he'd spend on a person, catching her in adultery and immediately forgiving her because she denied it too beautifully. Each poem is a rhetorical performance: Ovid argues, apostrophizes, invokes mythology, reverses himself, and lands a final turn with the timing of a practised comedian. He invented the mode of the suffering lover who is too articulate to suffer. Reading the Amores is to watch the cleverest poet in Rome construct the template that Petrarch would use a millennium later, and that has governed love poetry ever since — which is to say, Ovid built the room everyone else still lives in.

No. 15 on this list. If Beale Street Could Talk · James Baldwin · 1974

Firmly embedded in the American literary canon, the novel appears on major school and university syllabi, was adapted into an Academy Award-winning 2018 film, and is routinely included in retrospectives of 20th-century African American literature. Its status as one of Baldwin's essential works is uncontested.

No. 16 on this list. The Bluest Eye · Toni Morrison · 1970

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

While not as universally canonical as Beloved, The Bluest Eye is firmly established in the American literary canon, widely taught in universities, and recognized as a landmark debut that announced a major voice in American letters.

No. 17 on this list. The Book of the Duchess · Geoffrey Chaucer · 1368

A narrator who cannot sleep reads the Ovidian story of Ceyx and Alcyone to pass the night, then falls into a dream. He follows a hunt through a forest, enters a painted chamber depicting the fall of Troy, and finds a young man dressed entirely in black sitting against an oak tree, composing a lament. The man has lost his queen, he says — Fortune took her in a game of chess. The narrator asks him to say what he means directly. The man does: his lady, White, is dead. Chaucer wrote the poem around 1368 to commemorate Blanche of Lancaster, who died in the plague. The elegiac purpose is an open secret — the Black Knight is John of Gaunt, 'lady White' is Blanche, and the poem's consolatory argument runs through the dream rather than around it. Chaucer drew the form from French predecessors, particularly Machaut and Froissart, and adapted it into the first major English dream vision elegy. The language is Middle English, which means modern readers face a foreign vocabulary on nearly every page: 'soth,' 'wight,' 'ywis,' 'certes,' and 'eek' appear constantly, and the syntax involves regular inversion that demands slow, attentive reading. Classical allusions — Morpheus, Juno, Alcyone, Troilus — accumulate densely in a short poem of roughly 1,334 lines. A good glossary is essential. What it offers in return is one of the clearest windows into how a 14th-century poet thought about grief, consolation, and the work of art.

No. 18 on this list. Dombey and Son · Charles Dickens · 1848

Dombey and Son appears on Victorian literature syllabi across British and American universities and is published in every major prestige series — Oxford World's Classics, Penguin Classics, Norton Critical Editions. It is not as universally required as Great Expectations or Oliver Twist, but among scholars of the Victorian novel it occupies a central position. No major English literature survey of the 1840s omits it.

No. 19 on this list. Benito Cereno · Herman Melville · 1855

One of the most taught American novellas, central to literary discussions of race, slavery, and narrative perspective.

No. 20 on this list. Exercises in Style · Raymond Queneau · 1947

A cornerstone text of postwar French avant-garde literature and the OuLiPo tradition, widely assigned in literary theory and creative writing courses. Not a household classic in the manner of Camus but firmly enshrined in academic and experimental-fiction canons worldwide.

No. 21 on this list. Life & Times of Michael K · J.M. Coetzee · 1983

Taught in schools: UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize in 1983 and stands as a foundational text in postcolonial literature. Its examination of apartheid South Africa, individual resistance, and the ethics of fiction has secured its place in literary canons alongside Coetzee's other major works. Frequently taught in universities and cited in critical literature.

No. 22 on this list. The Weary Blues · Langston Hughes · 1926

Hughes's debut collection is a standard text in American literature and African American studies courses. Individual poems like 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' and 'The Weary Blues' appear in virtually every major poetry anthology. The collection anchors Harlem Renaissance units at universities across the country, representing a canonical status below the most-taught novels but above most poetry collections.

No. 23 on this list. Mansfield Park · Jane Austen · 1814

While less universally beloved than Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park holds secure canonical status as Austen's most morally complex and tonally difficult novel. Its treatment of slavery, colonialism, and evangelical morality has made it increasingly central to academic study, though it remains somewhat less embraced by general readers than her lighter works.

No. 24 on this list. Sons and Lovers · D.H. Lawrence · 1913

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Lawrence's autobiographical breakthrough. Paul Morel's Oedipal struggle, the mining community, the artistic awakening—the novel established Lawrence as major voice. Core text in British literature and modernism courses.

No. 25 on this list. The Auroras of Autumn · Wallace Stevens · 1950

Recognized as one of Stevens's major achievements, though less widely read than Harmonium. Central to scholarly discussions of late modernism.

No. 26 on this list. The Master Builder · Henrik Ibsen

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

The Master Builder is a fixture in university drama programs and world literature courses, anchoring Ibsen's late symbolic period and appearing on virtually every 'essential Ibsen' reading list. It ranks below A Doll's House and Hedda Gabler in curriculum frequency but appears regularly in comprehensive anthologies of modern drama. Its place in the Western theatrical canon is secure, if secondary to Ibsen's most politically urgent works.

No. 27 on this list. Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva · Marina Tsvetaeva

Tsvetaeva is firmly established as one of the four great Russian poets of the twentieth century, alongside Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Pasternak.

No. 28 on this list. Humboldt's Gift · Saul Bellow · 1976

Humboldt's Gift won the Pulitzer Prize (1976) and is regularly taught in American literature courses as a major postwar novel. It appears in academic surveys of contemporary fiction and in Bellow's canonical position is secured, though perhaps less universally assigned than The Great Gatsby or Beloved. Strong presence in 20th-century literature curricula.

No. 29 on this list. The Stories of John Cheever · John Cheever · 1979

Stories such as 'The Swimmer', 'The Enormous Radio', 'The Country Husband' and 'The Five-Forty-Eight' are standard in American short-fiction anthologies and courses. They are among the most taught American stories of the postwar period.

No. 30 on this list. Tar Baby · Toni Morrison · 1981

On Isle des Chevaliers, a Caribbean island reshaped by Haitian labor and American money, Valerian Street — a retired Philadelphia candy magnate — cultivates hydrangeas in his greenhouse and avoids his neighbors. His wife Margaret, his butler Sydney and cook Ondine, and his niece Jadine, a model trained in Paris, share the villa in a state of maintained tension. When Son — a Black American fugitive who stowed away on their supply boat — is discovered hiding in the house, he breaks open every unspoken arrangement the household depends on. Morrison uses the folk tale of the tar baby as the novel's armature: Jadine and Son become stuck to each other in a relationship that neither can survive and neither can leave. She embodies what he calls racial betrayal — educated in Europe, photographed in furs, at home nowhere. He embodies what she calls romantic primitivism — a man out of time, faithful to a Black Southern past that she finds suffocating. Morrison writes this conflict without a referee. The Caribbean setting is not backdrop but argument — the swamp, the rain forest, the blind horsemen who ride the hills at night all carry the weight of African spiritual history beneath the colonial surface. The novel ends on a mythic image: Son running toward those horsemen, Jadine flying back to Paris. Morrison offers no verdict on who was right.