The 100 best easy contemporary books

Questions people actually ask

What are the best easy contemporary books?

By literary regard, which weighs canonical status, critical standing and influence: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Dear Life by Alice Munro, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson and Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. ReadingRate ranks 100 such books, each with a difficulty score and a reading-time estimate.

Which easy contemporary books should I read first?

Start from difficulty, not from rank. The most approachable books on this list that still carry top literary regard are Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (about 2.2 hours), Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson and Dear Life by Alice Munro.

What are the shortest of the best easy contemporary books?

Among the top 25, the shortest are Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (about 38 min), American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (about 37 min) and New Kid by Jerry Craft (about 40 min), at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty.

Which of the best easy contemporary books are the established classics?

By canonical status, how firmly a book sits in curricula, anthologies and the canon: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Dear Life by Alice Munro, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson and Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.

How long would it take to read the top ten?

About 42 hours, at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 21 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 easy contemporary books to read?

Most of this list sits between 30 and 40 on ReadingRate's 100-point difficulty scale, where 40 to 55 is moderate. The summit is Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine at 45. 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 Contemporary Literature as one of its primary reading domains, and only when its author’s lifetime places it in the period.