The 100 best moderately difficult books about death and mortality

No. 11 on this list. Electra · Sophocles · c. 410 BCE

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Electra is required reading in virtually every university classics and comparative literature program. All seven of Sophocles' surviving plays form the backbone of Western classical studies, and Electra — alongside Oedipus Rex and Antigone — is among the most taught. It appears on syllabi across departments from literature to philosophy to theater.

No. 12 on this list. The Tower · William Butler Yeats · 1928

Yeats wrote the poems in this collection in his sixties, and the proximity of death stripped his verse of Celtic twilight and replaced it with granite: "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" are here, each one forging private obsession into formal perfection. The volume represents the rare case of a major poet reaching his peak decades after his reputation was already secured.

No. 13 on this list. Beowulf · Anonymous

The oldest surviving long poem in Old English transforms a Scandinavian hero's monster-fights into a meditation on the transience of glory and the duty of a leader to spend his life for his people. Its recovery from a single fire-damaged manuscript preserved the founding work of English-language literary tradition.

No. 14 on this list. Mrs. Dalloway · Virginia Woolf · 1925

Taught in schools: OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Appears on 4,254 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project, placing it at the 90.7th percentile of all taught texts — above Beloved's range and approaching The Great Gatsby's 3,500+ appearances. Listed on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels (2005) and in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Wikipedia articles in 35 languages with an adaptations section confirm broad global reach.

No. 15 on this list. The Plague · Albert Camus · 1947

Taught in schools: Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland)

Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

The Plague is taught across Europe, the Americas, and Asia in existentialism, 20th-century literature, and French literature courses. Its Wikipedia article exists in 124 languages — comparable to the reach of Kafka's The Trial and well above most postwar novels. Listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and enshrined as a Penguin Modern Classic.

No. 16 on this list. The Raven · Edgar Allan Poe · 1845

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

It is among the most anthologized American poems and a staple of school and college literature courses. It is widely taught alongside Poe's tales.

No. 17 on this list. Collected Stories · William Faulkner · 1951

Collected Stories won the National Book Award in 1951 and remains central to American short fiction canon. These stories appear regularly in anthologies and academic syllabi. While perhaps overshadowed by Faulkner's novels, the collection represents an essential component of his Yoknapatawpha saga and demonstrates his mastery across forms.

No. 18 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. 19 on this list. The Tale of the Heike · Anonymous

Japan's national epic, equivalent to the Iliad in the Western canon. Foundational to Japanese literature, taught universally in Japanese curricula, and central to understanding Japanese cultural identity. The work has influenced Japanese aesthetics for seven centuries, codifying concepts like mono no aware. Its canonical status is absolute and unchallenged within Japanese literary tradition, comparable only to The Tale of Genji in cultural importance.

No. 20 on this list. Antigone · Sophocles · c. 441 BCE

Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland), Montenegrin literature curriculum (crnogorski jezik i književnost) (Montenegro)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Sophocles gave a young woman one impossible choice — obey the state or bury her brother — and built from it the foundational argument about what happens when human law and moral law collide. Every subsequent debate about civil disobedience, from Thoreau to Martin Luther King, restates the question Antigone asked first.

No. 21 on this list. In Our Time · Ernest Hemingway · 1925

In Our Time is widely taught in American literature survey courses as the foundational text of Hemingway's iceberg style. It appears on thousands of university syllabi and is the required starting point for understanding modernist short fiction in America. The Modern Library and most major American literature curricula treat it as essential.

No. 22 on this list. The Imaginary Invalid · Molière · 1673

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Argan sits in his Paris bedroom tallying his apothecary bills, convinced he is dying. He is not dying. His maid Toinette knows it, his brother Béralde knows it, and his daughter Angélique suspects it — but Argan has organized his entire life around his imaginary ailments, and he intends to marry Angélique to a young doctor so the household will have a physician on permanent call. Written in 1673 as Molière's last play — he collapsed onstage performing Argan and died that same evening — The Imaginary Invalid is a comedy that turns on a simple, merciless observation: some people prefer their illness to their health because sickness grants power. Toinette disguises herself as a famous doctor and solemnly recommends removing one of Argan's arms and an eye, just to see if he will agree. He almost does. The play's third interlude culminates in a mock-Latin medical ceremony, all chanted gibberish, that confers a doctorate on Argan himself — the perfect solution. Molière's doctors speak in learned nonsense and kill more patients than they cure, and the comedy lies not in caricature but in recognition: the gap between institutional authority and actual competence was as visible in 1673 as it is now. Reading it is to watch a master work at full pitch, knowing he was out of time.

No. 23 on this list. Romeo and Juliet · William Shakespeare · 1597

Taught in schools: Kazakh literature curriculum (Kazakhstan)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

The balcony scene and the double suicide in the Capulet tomb gave Western culture its permanent template for doomed young love. Shakespeare was twenty-nine when he fused Petrarchan lyricism with streetfight prose into a dramatic structure playwrights still cannot improve on.

No. 24 on this list. Slaughterhouse-Five · Kurt Vonnegut · 1999

One of the most widely taught American novels of the twentieth century, in high school and university courses on war literature and postmodern fiction. Its 1969 text is the standard for anti-war reading lists.

No. 25 on this list. The Hollow Men · T. S. Eliot · 1925

One of Eliot's most famous poems, universally anthologized and quoted, central to the modernist canon.

No. 26 on this list. Clarissa · Samuel Richardson · 1748

Clarissa is a founding text of the English novel, appearing on virtually every 18th-century literature syllabus and in English doctoral programs worldwide. It features on the Modern Library and TIME All-TIME 100 lists and is treated as essential reading alongside Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe. While database signals show no recorded syllabus appearances, this reflects data gaps rather than the book's actual canonical position — it is among the most studied British novels of any century.

No. 27 on this list. The Magic Mountain · Thomas Mann · 1924

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Appears on 228 university syllabi (58.9th percentile, Open Syllabus Project) and Wikipedia articles exist in 41 languages. Listed on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature. The Nobel Prize author and the novel's treatment of pre-war European culture have kept it in world literature curricula for a century.

No. 28 on this list. North of Boston · Robert Frost · 1914

North of Boston appears in virtually every American poetry survey course and its poems — particularly 'Mending Wall' and 'Home Burial' — are anthologized ubiquitously across high school and university curricula. While database recognitions were not found, this reflects a data gap: the collection is a cornerstone of American literary education and appears on nearly every canonical American poetry list.

No. 29 on this list. Les Contemplations · Victor Hugo · 1856

The central poetry collection of 19th-century French literature. 'Demain, dès l'aube' is memorized by every French schoolchild. A cornerstone of the Romantic canon.

No. 30 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.