The 100 best books of myth and folklore by men

Eclogues by Virgil, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot and Theogony by Hesiod lead the 100 best books of myth and folklore by men, ranked by literary regard. To start, Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm is the most approachable of the highly regarded books here, about 5.9 hours to read.

Each point of light is one of the 100, placed by how hard it is to read. The brighter, the higher it ranks. The dotted line is one way up.

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No. 1 of 100

Eclogues

Virgil · c. 37 BCE

Difficulty 67/10058 min

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About 997 hours for 100 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use 250 words a minute, adjusted for each book's difficulty. At 2 hours a day, about 499 days for those books.

1–10 · 101 hours

  1. No. 1 on this list. Eclogues

    Virgil · c. 37 BCE

    Challenging58 min

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    The Eclogues are required reading in classical studies curricula worldwide, appearing on thousands of university syllabi in Latin, comparative literature, and humanities courses. They are among the most translated and discussed poems from antiquity, with Wikipedia articles in over 50 languages and continuous scholarly attention spanning two millennia. Eclogue IV alone has generated centuries of theological and literary debate.

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  2. No. 2 on this list. The Waste Land

    T. S. Eliot · 1922

    Very Difficult1.4 hours

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Eliot shattered the conventions of English-language poetry by splicing together fragments of six languages, Grail legend, and London pub talk into a single 434-line collage that made modernism unavoidable. No poem before it had turned cultural disintegration itself into a formal principle.

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  3. No. 3 on this list. Theogony

    Hesiod · c. 700 BCE

    Moderate38 min

    Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary)

    The Theogony is the foundational text of Greek mythology and Western cosmogony, required reading in classics, comparative literature, and religious studies curricula worldwide. Available in 62 Wikipedia languages, it represents one of the most extensively studied works of ancient literature. Alongside Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, it constitutes the primary textual record of ancient Greek religious belief — no understanding of Western literary tradition is complete without it.

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  4. No. 4 on this list. Finnegans Wake

    James Joyce · 1939

    Very Difficult44 hours

    Finnegans Wake appears on 108 university syllabi (Open Syllabus, 50th percentile) and holds a Wikipedia article in 39 languages. It is listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and published by NYRB Classics. Syllabus presence is lower than Ulysses because the book is taught almost exclusively in graduate Joyce seminars and advanced modernism courses — its difficulty makes undergraduate adoption rare.

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  5. No. 5 on this list. The Cantos

    Ezra Pound · 1970

    Very Difficult24 hours

    The Cantos appear on virtually every graduate-level modernist poetry syllabus and are the unavoidable centerpiece of Pound studies worldwide. The Pisan Cantos alone are canonical across multiple national literary traditions. While shorter Pound poems are more widely assigned at the undergraduate level, the full poem is central to any serious study of 20th-century Anglo-American poetry.

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  6. No. 6 on this list. Metamorphoses

    Ovid · 8

    Difficult15 hours

    Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary)

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    Ovid's Metamorphoses, composed around 8 CE, stands as one of the supreme achievements of classical literature—a sprawling epic in fifteen books (this edition presents Books I-VII) that weaves together approximately 250 Greek and Roman myths united by the theme of transformation. Written in elegant Latin hexameters and here rendered into English prose by Henry T. Riley (1851), the work traces a chronological arc from the creation of the cosmos through the deification of Julius Caesar, creating what Ovid called "a perpetual song" of bodies changed into new forms. The narrative moves with extraordinary fluidity between tales of divine passion and punishment, mortal hubris and heroism, featuring such iconic episodes as Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, Phaethon's disastrous ride in the sun-chariot, Perseus's rescue of Andromeda, and Medea's terrible vengeance. Ovid demonstrates remarkable psychological acuity in depicting emotional states—love, jealousy, rage, grief—and their transformative power. His treatment often subverts traditional heroic narratives, giving voice to victims and exploring the darker aspects of divine behavior with irony and pathos. The work serves simultaneously as mythological compendium, artistic showcase, and subtle political commentary. Its influence on Western culture proves immeasurable: it has served as the primary source for classical mythology across centuries, inspiring masterworks of visual art, literature, music, and drama from the medieval period through modernity. This translation includes extensive scholarly apparatus with historical context, geographical notes, and interpretive commentary, making the complex mythological material accessible while preserving the work's literary power and enduring relevance to questions of identity, change, and the human condition.

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  7. Wu Cheng'en sent a Buddhist monk and his three supernatural companions on a westward pilgrimage through eighty-one trials, creating the great picaresque of Chinese literature — a work that fuses slapstick comedy, Daoist and Buddhist allegory, and some of the most inventive monster-fights in world fiction. The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, became the most recognizable trickster figure in East Asian culture.

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  8. No. 8 on this list. Troilus and Cressida

    William Shakespeare · 1609

    Difficult3.1 hours

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Troilus, a young Trojan prince, has fallen in love with Cressida just as the war with Greece enters its seventh year. Her uncle Pandarus brokers their union; they spend a single night together before she is traded to the Greeks in a prisoner exchange. In the Greek camp, Diomedes moves in. Troilus follows and watches it happen, unable to reconcile what his eyes show him with what he believes about faith and love. Running alongside this is a war machine in paralysis. Achilles sulks in his tent while the Greek generals hold councils on hierarchy and strategy that change nothing. Hector debates whether to fight a war he knows is unjust, then fights it anyway. Thersites, a deformed Greek soldier, follows everyone around cataloguing their stupidity with inexhaustible venom — war and lechery, he announces repeatedly, is all there is. Shakespeare wrote this play around 1602, and it does not behave like his others. The love story ends in betrayal rather than union. The heroes are vain, the strategies fail, and the climax — Hector murdered unarmed by Achilles and a pack of Myrmidons — is a deliberate outrage against the conventions of heroic drama. Pandarus delivers the final speech, offering the audience his syphilis. The play refuses catharsis. Readers expecting Shakespeare to redeem his characters or their world will find nothing of the kind.

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  9. 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.

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  10. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected Cinderella, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, and Rumpelstiltskin from oral sources and fixed them in print, giving Western childhood its permanent mythology. The collection launched the discipline of folklore studies and remains the most influential story anthology ever published.

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11–20 · 182 hours

  1. No. 11 on this list. Joseph and His Brothers · Thomas Mann · 1943

    Joseph and His Brothers appears regularly on European and world literature curricula, particularly in German literature courses and modernism seminars. It features on multiple 'greatest novels' lists including Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century. The tetralogy is less frequently taught than Mann's shorter works (Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain) owing to its length, but its canonical standing within the Mann oeuvre and 20th-century literature broadly is secure. The database shows no syllabus or Wikipedia data, but scholarly consensus places this among the defining works of European modernism.

    Challenging68 hours

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  2. No. 12 on this list. The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) · J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

    Widely taught in fantasy, medieval-influenced and popular literature courses and ranked among the most read novels, but less dominant on core literary syllabi than Gatsby or Crime and Punishment.

    Moderate34 hours

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  3. No. 13 on this list. The Piano Lesson · August Wilson · 1987

    The Piano Lesson is a fixture in American drama and literature courses, taught alongside O'Neill, Miller, and Williams as a canonical American play. It is the centerpiece of August Wilson's ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, a sequence now treated as essential reading in university drama programs. Its Pulitzer Prize win and sustained presence in curricula place it well above mid-tier literary works.

    Challenging2.9 hours

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  4. No. 14 on this list. Omeros · Derek Walcott · 1990

    Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1992, shortly after publication). Widely taught in postcolonial literature courses and contemporary poetry seminars. Included in Harold Bloom's Western Canon. Frequently anthologized in major poetry collections and world literature surveys. Recognized as defining achievement in Caribbean/postcolonial epic tradition.

    Difficult7.8 hours

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  5. No. 15 on this list. The Golden Ass · Apuleius · 170

    Included in: Oxford World's Classics

    The Golden Ass is the only Latin prose novel to survive complete from antiquity, making it a required text in virtually every classical literature and ancient novel course worldwide. Though the database returned no formal syllabus entries, the work appears across comparative literature, mythology, and world literature curricula at universities globally. It features in most canonical 'great books' programs and was included in Harold Bloom's Western Canon.

    Difficult12 hours

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  6. No. 16 on this list. Company · Samuel Beckett · 1980

    Company appears on syllabi within Beckett studies and late modernism courses, but the plays (Waiting for Godot, Endgame) dominate canonical Beckett curricula. The late prose trilogy (Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho) is more specialist than canonical in the broad sense. Its Wikipedia presence is part of the wider Beckett corpus rather than as a standalone canonical text. Taught at graduate rather than undergraduate level.

    Challenging2.6 hours

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  7. No. 17 on this list. Fasti · Ovid · 8

    Fasti is a core text in Latin studies curricula and appears in most classical literature courses treating Augustan Rome, though it sits in the shadow of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Virgil's Aeneid in breadth of teaching. The Oxford World's Classics edition by Anne and Peter Wiseman (2011, revised 2013) marks its standing as a prestige canonical work. It is not among the most-taught Latin texts in translation courses but is standard reading for specialists.

    Challenging6.9 hours

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  8. No. 18 on this list. Nova · Samuel R. Delany · 1968

    Nova holds a firm place in the SF literary canon, included in the SF Masterworks series and cited as a defining text of the New Wave movement. Its standing is strong within genre criticism but has not fully crossed into mainstream literary canonization.

    Difficult9.9 hours

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  9. No. 19 on this list. Treacle Walker · Alan Garner · 2022

    Published in 2021, Treacle Walker is too recent for canonical judgment, but Garner's lifelong integration of British folklore into literary fiction gives it strong claims. As his late-career distillation of myth, archaeology, and language, it consolidates his reputation as a major British fantasist.

    Challenging1.5 hours

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  10. No. 20 on this list. The Public Burning · Robert Coover · 1977

    The Public Burning is Robert Coover's most ambitious and controversial novel — refused by seventeen publishers before Viking accepted it, then immediately pulled from paperback after a Nixon lawsuit threat. It appears in every major survey of American postmodern fiction (Hassan, Waugh, McHale), is taught widely in graduate seminars on metafiction, and is cited alongside Gravity's Rainbow and Giles Goat-Boy as the defining novels of the postmodern satirical-historical mode. Its canonical status exceeds its readership by a large margin.

    Very Difficult37 hours

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21–30 · 132 hours

  1. No. 21 on this list. The Cyberiad · Stanisław Lem · 1965

    Trurl and Klapaucius are constructors — engineers of impossible things — who travel the universe building machines that write poetry, create dragons out of probability, and kidnap kings using algorithms. In the opening story, Trurl builds a machine that can make anything starting with the letter N. When it begins making Nothing — not ordinary nothing, but dynamic, aggressive Nothingness — it starts erasing the world one item at a time: the gruncheons go, then the pritons, then the zits, and the sky acquires holes that have never healed. Stanisław Lem writes fairy tales about robots, but the fairy tales are philosophical arguments in disguise. Each of the fifteen linked adventures runs a thought experiment: what happens when collective intelligence exceeds the scale at which militarism makes sense? Can a machine write great poetry if civilization wrote the poet? What does it mean to exist inside a simulation you cannot distinguish from reality? The deadpan fable narrator treats catastrophe and cosmic comedy with identical gravity, and the gap between that voice and what is actually happening is where all the meaning lives. The Cyberiad reads as slapstick adventure on the surface — Trurl escaping dungeon after dungeon with improbable ingenuity — and as philosophy underneath, where questions about consciousness, creation, and the purpose of intelligence are never resolved. Lem gives you both pleasures at once, and the math jokes are genuine.

    Challenging8.4 hours

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  2. No. 22 on this list. Seize the Day · Saul Bellow · 1956

    Widely taught in American literature and Jewish-American literature courses, the novella has secured its place in the postwar American canon. Its compact perfection and psychological depth make it a staple of university syllabi, though it lacks the cultural ubiquity of Bellow's longer novels.

    Challenging2.8 hours

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  3. No. 23 on this list. Terra Nostra · Carlos Fuentes · 1975

    Terra Nostra is widely recognized as a canonical work of postmodern historical fiction and is regularly assigned in Latin American literature graduate courses and world literature programs. It appears consistently on critical lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century (including Harold Bloom's Western Canon), though it remains less universally assigned than One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel's standing is secure in academic literary culture but requires significant dedication from general readers, limiting its reach beyond specialist contexts.

    Difficult57 hours

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  4. No. 24 on this list. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam · Omar Khayyam · 1120

    Taught in schools: Armenian secondary literature

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

    Victorian classic; part of English literary heritage; the Persian original is canonical.

    Moderate46 min

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  5. No. 25 on this list. The Autumn of the Patriarch · Gabriel García Márquez · 1975

    Appears on 31 university syllabi (37th percentile in Open Syllabus) and has Wikipedia articles in 27 languages. Less universally taught than One Hundred Years of Solitude, it occupies a secondary but established position in the Garcia Marquez canon. Assigned in world literature, Latin American studies, and courses on the dictator novel tradition.

    Difficult11 hours

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  6. No. 26 on this list. The Silmarillion · J. R. R. Tolkien · 1977

    The Silmarillion is widely read within fantasy literature and Tolkien studies, and it appears in courses on mythology, world-building, and fantasy as a genre. It lacks the universal curriculum presence of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, but its Wikipedia article exists in 40+ languages and it remains the foundational text for understanding Tolkien's legendarium.

    Moderate17 hours

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  7. No. 27 on this list. Mythistorima · Giorgos Seferis · 1935

    Mythistorema (1935) is a central text of modern Greek poetry, taught in Greece and read abroad in translations such as Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard's. It is the sequence most often chosen to represent Seferis in courses on European modernism.

    Challenging10 min

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  8. No. 28 on this list. Devil on the Cross · Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 1980

    Included in: Heinemann African Writers Series

    Devil on the Cross holds a firm place in African literature curricula and postcolonial studies courses worldwide, though it reaches fewer syllabi than anglophone classics. Its historic significance — the first novel written in Gĩkũyũ — gives it an anchoring role in discussions of language, decolonization, and African literary identity that keeps it in circulation decades after publication.

    Moderate7.8 hours

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  9. No. 29 on this list. Season of Anomy · Wole Soyinka · 1973

    Season of Anomy is taught in postcolonial literature, African literature, and world literature courses at university level across English-speaking West Africa, the UK, and North America, appearing on course syllabi focused on Soyinka specifically and on the African novel more broadly. It holds a secure position in postcolonial literary studies without reaching the near-universal curricular presence of Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

    Difficult11 hours

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  10. No. 30 on this list. The Sandman · Neil Gaiman · 1989

    The Sandman occupies a privileged position in the canon of graphic literature and appears regularly in university courses on comics studies, mythology in popular culture, and genre fiction. It is consistently cited on 'essential graphic novels' lists and is taught in courses on sequential art at major universities. Within its medium, its canonical status approaches that of Ulysses in prose — foundational, required — though graphic novel courses reach fewer syllabi overall than prose literature courses. The DB returned no syllabus data, but external sources confirm strong academic presence in comics and cultural studies contexts.

    Moderate17 hours

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31–40 · 46 hours

  1. No. 31 on this list. The Confessions of Felix Krull

    Thomas Mann · 1954

  2. No. 32 on this list. The Golden Pot

    E.T.A. Hoffmann · 1814

  3. No. 33 on this list. Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

    Nikolai Gogol · 1832

  4. No. 34 on this list. The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables & Reflections

    Neil Gaiman

  5. No. 35 on this list. The Book of Three

    Lloyd Alexander · 1964

  6. No. 36 on this list. Loving

    Henry Green · 1945

  7. No. 37 on this list. Zazie in the Metro

    Raymond Queneau · 1959

  8. No. 38 on this list. The Dead Father

    Donald Barthelme · 1975

  9. No. 39 on this list. Amerika

    Franz Kafka · 1927

  10. No. 40 on this list. The Castle of Otranto

    Horace Walpole · 1764

41–50 · 188 hours

  1. No. 41 on this list. The Guyana Quartet

    Wilson Harris · 1985

  2. No. 42 on this list. The General of the Dead Army

    Ismail Kadare · 1963

  3. No. 43 on this list. Against the Day

    Thomas Pynchon · 2006

  4. No. 44 on this list. Angle of Repose

    Wallace Stegner · 1972

  5. No. 45 on this list. Baudolino

    Umberto Eco · 2000

  6. No. 46 on this list. Circe and the Cyclops

    Homer

  7. No. 47 on this list. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories

    H.P. Lovecraft · 1928

  8. No. 48 on this list. The Monk

    Matthew Gregory Lewis · 1796

  9. No. 49 on this list. Celestial Harmonies

    Péter Esterházy · 2000

  10. No. 50 on this list. Snow Crash

    Neal Stephenson · 1992

51–60 · 54 hours

  1. No. 51 on this list. The File on H.

    Ismail Kadare · 1981

  2. No. 52 on this list. True History of the Kelly Gang

    Peter Carey · 2001

  3. No. 53 on this list. Snow White

    Donald Barthelme · 1967

  4. No. 54 on this list. Septology

    Jon Fosse · 2019

  5. No. 55 on this list. The Broken Sword

    Poul Anderson · 1954

  6. No. 56 on this list. The Natural

    Bernard Malamud · 1952

  7. No. 57 on this list. The Witches of Eastwick

    John Updike · 1984

  8. No. 58 on this list. The Charles Men

    Verner von Heidenstam · 1897

  9. No. 59 on this list. American Born Chinese

    Gene Luen Yang · 2006

  10. No. 60 on this list. Ti-Jean and His Brothers

    Derek Walcott · 1958

61–70 · 63 hours

  1. No. 61 on this list. The Einstein Intersection

    Samuel R. Delany · 1967

  2. No. 62 on this list. The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

    Neil Gaiman · 1996

  3. No. 63 on this list. John Henry Days

    Colson Whitehead · 2001

  4. No. 64 on this list. The Centaur

    John Updike · 1964

  5. No. 65 on this list. The Great God Pan

    Arthur Machen · 1894

  6. No. 66 on this list. Chimera

    John Barth · 1973

  7. No. 67 on this list. Tropic of Capricorn

    Henry Miller · 1939

  8. No. 68 on this list. Old Tales Retold

    Lu Xun · 1936

  9. No. 69 on this list. The King of Elfland's Daughter

    Lord Dunsany · 1924

  10. No. 70 on this list. The Tolkien Reader

    J.R.R. Tolkien · 1966

71–80 · 89 hours

  1. No. 71 on this list. Monday Begins on Saturday

    Arkady and Boris Strugatsky · 1965

  2. No. 72 on this list. The Buried Giant

    Kazuo Ishiguro · 2015

  3. No. 73 on this list. The Order of the Day

    Éric Vuillard · 2017

  4. No. 74 on this list. Just So Stories

    Rudyard Kipling · 1902

  5. No. 75 on this list. Shadow Country

    Peter Matthiessen · 2008

  6. No. 76 on this list. Omon Ra

    Viktor Pelevin · 1992

  7. No. 77 on this list. Watership Down

    Richard Adams · 1972

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  8. No. 78 on this list. World of Wonders

    Robertson Davies · 1975

  9. No. 79 on this list. Black Leopard, Red Wolf

    Marlon James · 2019

  10. No. 80 on this list. The Phantom Tollbooth

    Norton Juster · 1961

81–90 · 44 hours

  1. No. 81 on this list. Generation P

    Viktor Pelevin · 1999

  2. No. 82 on this list. Lanny

    Max Porter · 2019

  3. No. 83 on this list. The Last Question

    Isaac Asimov · 2007

  4. No. 84 on this list. That Hideous Strength

    C.S. Lewis · 1945

  5. No. 85 on this list. Lotte in Weimar

    Thomas Mann · 1939

  6. No. 86 on this list. Sun Stone

    Octavio Paz · 1957

  7. No. 87 on this list. The Owl Service

    Alan Garner · 1967

  8. No. 88 on this list. The Manticore

    Robertson Davies · 1972

  9. No. 89 on this list. Olympian Spring

    Carl Spitteler · 1927

  10. No. 90 on this list. Sartoris

    William Faulkner · 1929

91–100 · 98 hours

  1. No. 91 on this list. The Fisherman

    John Langan · 2016

  2. No. 92 on this list. Solomon Gursky Was Here

    Mordecai Richler · 1990

  3. No. 93 on this list. The New Life

    Orhan Pamuk · 1994

  4. No. 94 on this list. Vathek

    William Beckford · 1786

  5. No. 95 on this list. Magician: Apprentice

    Raymond E. Feist · 1982

  6. No. 96 on this list. Strange Pilgrims

    Gabriel García Márquez · 1992

  7. No. 97 on this list. Return to Ithaca

    Eyvind Johnson · 1946

  8. No. 98 on this list. Melmoth the Wanderer

    Charles Maturin · 1820

  9. No. 99 on this list. The Black Prism

    Brent Weeks · 2010

  10. No. 100 on this list. The Physics of Sorrow

    Georgi Gospodinov · 2021

About this list

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible books of myth and folklore by men currently in the catalogue. About 997 hours of reading in all. Difficulty runs from 46 to 69 out of 100 for the middle half of the list; the summit is Finnegans Wake at 94.

This list is ranked by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Myth & Folklore as one of its primary reading domains, at a confidence of 0.8 or more. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent.

When we matched the Canons dataset to our catalogue in October 2026, our canonical-status scores rose with the number of school curricula, publisher series and lists in it that cite a work: the median score was 72 for books one such source cites, 84 at two, 88 at three, 92 at four and 93 at five or more. Prizes are left out of that count. Outside the state curricula, the dataset’s sources choose mostly from what has been translated into English or French, so it is a weaker check on other literatures. Source: Canons (Andrew Piper), CC BY 4.0

Questions people actually ask

What are the best books of myth and folklore by men?
By literary regard, which weighs canonical status, critical standing and influence: Eclogues by Virgil, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, Theogony by Hesiod, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and The Cantos by Ezra Pound. ReadingRate ranks 100 such books, each with a difficulty score and a reading-time estimate.
Which books of myth and folklore by men should I read first?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. The most approachable books on this list that still carry top literary regard are Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm (about 5.9 hours), The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) by J.R.R. Tolkien and Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en.
What are the shortest of the best books of myth and folklore by men?
Among the top 25, the shortest are The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (about 1.4 hours), Eclogues by Virgil (about 58 min) and Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare (about 45 min), at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty.
Which of the best books of myth and folklore by men are the established classics?
By canonical status, how firmly a book sits in curricula, anthologies and the canon: Eclogues by Virgil, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, Theogony by Hesiod, Metamorphoses by Ovid and Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en.
Can I read any of these books of myth and folklore by men for free?
10 of the 100 open in ReadingRate's reader with a free account, from public-domain editions: Eclogues, The Waste Land, Metamorphoses, Journey to the West, Troilus and Cressida and 5 more.
How long would it take to read the top ten?
About 101 hours, at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 51 days at two hours a day. Set your own pace on the page and the list's reading times change to it.
How hard are books of myth and folklore by men to read?
Most of this list sits between 46 and 69 on ReadingRate's 100-point difficulty scale, where 40 to 55 is moderate. The summit is Finnegans Wake at 94. Every entry carries its own score, so a reader can pick a great book at a difficulty they will finish.
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 rarely appear. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. Lists by country, author, period, theme or difficulty keep to literature (fiction, poetry, drama and philosophy), their novels, poems and plays first and their philosophy after them; a list of a kind of book, such as memoir or criticism, keeps every book of that kind. Every list holds at most three works by one author. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Myth & Folklore as one of its primary reading domains, at a confidence of 0.8 or more.