The 100 best easy books

No. 11 on this list. Discourses on Livy · Niccolò Machiavelli · 1531

Niccolò Machiavelli spent the last decade of his life under house arrest, banned from Florence's political world, and wrote the Discourses on Livy as a systematic attempt to teach what he could no longer practice. Working through Titus Livy's history of Rome book by book, Machiavelli extracts from each episode a principle of republican governance — how to found a city, sustain a republic, manage armies, treat conquered peoples, handle conspiracies, and survive the inevitable corruption of institutions. The argument runs to 142 chapters across three books, each one a small essay: he states a thesis, marshals Roman examples, and delivers a verdict. Machiavelli's Rome is not an idealized past but a working laboratory. When he recommends that a new republic must sometimes execute its founding families, or that a prince should appear virtuous rather than be virtuous, he is not being provocative — he is being precise. The Discourses is the longer and more theoretically ambitious of his two major works, and the one where his commitment to republican liberty is explicit rather than implied. Readers accustomed to political philosophy as abstract theory will find this text unusual: it thinks in cases, in generals, in the specific behavior of specific tribunes during specific sieges. The Victorian translation adds a layer of archaic syntax to the Renaissance argument. What emerges is a political science conducted before the term existed — unsentimental, empirical, and still asking questions no subsequent political thinker has fully answered.

No. 12 on this list. The War of the Worlds · H.G. Wells · 1898

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

The War of the Worlds is a cornerstone of science fiction, taught widely in literature and science fiction courses. While not as universally assigned as 1984 or Brave New World, it appears regularly in surveys of speculative fiction, Victorian literature, and science fiction history. The novel's influence on the genre ensures its continued academic presence.

No. 13 on this list. Bérénice · Jean Racine · 1670

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Bérénice is a cornerstone of French classical literature, taught in virtually every French lycée and featured in world literature and drama curricula internationally. Alongside Phèdre and Andromaque, it is one of the three works most associated with Racine's genius and is considered essential reading for anyone studying French neoclassical theatre.

No. 14 on this list. Of Mice and Men · John Steinbeck · 1937

Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English, Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

One of the most taught works in American secondary and post-secondary education, with 548 syllabus appearances placing it in the top tier of assigned literature. Included in Library of America, Penguin Classics, Everyman's Library, and Penguin Modern Classics. Appears on the BBC Big Read Top 100 and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Its status as core American literary reading is unquestioned.

No. 15 on this list. The Miser · Molière · 1668

Taught in schools: Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

The Miser is a staple of French literature and world theater curricula across universities globally, ranking among the most performed and studied comedies of the Western canon. While no syllabus count is in the database, it appears consistently on comparative literature, French studies, and drama course lists. Its presence in world literature anthologies across dozens of languages reflects its canonical standing.

No. 16 on this list. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass · Lewis Carroll · 1871

No syllabus or Wikipedia-language data is recorded for this edition in our database, but Alice is a fixture of children's-literature, Victorian-studies, and philosophy-of-language courses worldwide. It remains one of the most translated books in history, with a reach comparable to Hamlet's or The Great Gatsby's syllabus ubiquity.

No. 17 on this list. Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History · Art Spiegelman · 1991

Maus is widely taught in schools and universities as a central Holocaust text and as the key work of the graphic novel, and it won a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1992 for the combined work. It is now standard in comics studies and memory studies.

No. 18 on this list. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich · Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1962

A single January day in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s, told through the eyes of Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, a peasant ten years into a trumped-up sentence for treason. Solzhenitsyn structures the novel as a minute-by-minute account: the pre-dawn wake-up, the roll call in −30° cold, the march to the construction site, the bricklaying in the wind, the return, the thin soup, and lights out. The genius of the book is its scale — one man, one day — and the moral universe Shukhov navigates within it. He is not heroic in any conventional sense; he calculates how to get an extra bowl of gruel, how to pocket a useful piece of metal, how to avoid the guards' notice. Yet these calculations constitute a form of dignity. Published in 1962 in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir under Khrushchev's brief thaw, the novella hit Soviet readers like a physical shock: the Gulag had existed for decades, but naming it in print was new. In the West it became the first credible inside account of the camp system, a document as much as a novel. Solzhenitsyn's prose is close-grained and unsentimental, the voice tuned to Shukhov's practical intelligence. The cold is not metaphorical; the bread is not symbolic. The facts speak.

No. 19 on this list. A Good Man Is Hard to Find · Flannery O'Connor · 1955

One of the most important short story collections in American literature. The title story alone is among the most widely taught and analyzed works of American fiction.

No. 20 on this list. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe · C.S. Lewis · 1950

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is taught in elementary and middle schools worldwide and is considered essential children's literature. It appears on countless reading lists and is often children's introduction to fantasy literature. The Narnia series is foundational to understanding modern fantasy and children's fiction.

No. 21 on this list. The Bhagavad Gita · Vyasa · c. 200 BCE

The Gita—a 700-verse dialogue between the warrior prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna, who is an avatar of God—is embedded within the Mahabharata but has been read as a standalone scripture for centuries. On the eve of a catastrophic battle, Arjuna sees his kinsmen arrayed on both sides and refuses to fight. Krishna's response unfolds the central teachings of Hindu philosophy: karma yoga (the path of selfless action), bhakti yoga (the path of devotion), and jnana yoga (the path of knowledge). Krishna argues that Arjuna must act—not because the outcome matters but because action without attachment to results is the nature of dharma. The Gita's synthesis of duty and detachment, action and renunciation, has made it the most widely read scripture in Hinduism and one of the most influential philosophical texts in world literature. Gandhi called it his 'eternal mother'; Oppenheimer quoted it upon witnessing the first nuclear explosion. Its teachings on duty, selflessness, and the nature of consciousness continue to resonate across cultures and centuries.

No. 22 on this list. Robinson Crusoe · Daniel Defoe · 1719

Taught in schools: Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

Defoe dropped a castaway on an island with a wrecked ship's supplies and invented the novel as we know it: plain prose, daily particulars, one man's consciousness stretched across twenty-eight years of solitude. Every survival narrative and desert-island story descends from Crusoe's footprint in the sand.

No. 23 on this list. The Old Man and the Sea · Ernest Hemingway · 1953

Taught in schools: Kazakh literature curriculum (Kazakhstan)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Hemingway reduced fiction to one old man, one marlin, and the Gulf Stream, and proved that a story stripped to its barest elements could carry the weight of a parable about endurance, craft, and the dignity of losing. The novella's final image — the skeleton of the great fish picked clean at the dock — is among the most perfectly earned symbols in American literature.

No. 24 on this list. A Christmas Carol · Charles Dickens · 1843

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

A Christmas Carol is among the most widely taught Victorian texts in the English-speaking world, a fixture on secondary and university literature curricula in the UK, US, and Commonwealth nations. Its Wikipedia article exists in over 60 languages, and it appears on virtually every canonical list of Victorian prose. No other work of comparable length has achieved the same degree of curricular permanence.

No. 25 on this list. Montage of a Dream Deferred · Langston Hughes · 1951

A major work of American poetry. 'Harlem' alone has achieved a canonical status rivaling any single American poem of the twentieth century.

No. 26 on this list. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales · Jacob Grimm · 1976

The Grimm tales are among the most widely taught and anthologized texts in the Western world, and they anchor folklore, children's literature, and German studies courses. Cinderella, Snow White, and Hansel and Gretel are cultural touchstones, though the edition itself is more of a reading text than a syllabus staple.

No. 27 on this list. The Death of Ivan Ilyich · Leo Tolstoy · 1886

Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Russian FGOS literature standard

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Universally regarded as one of the greatest novellas ever written. Studied across literature and philosophy courses.

No. 28 on this list. Annabel Lee · Edgar Allan Poe · 1849

One of the most anthologised poems in American literature and a standard school text.

No. 29 on this list. Andromaque · Jean Racine · 1667

Andromaque, widowed queen of Troy, has one goal: protect her son Astyanax, the last living heir of Hector. Standing between her son's life and his death is Pyrrhus, the Greek king who killed her husband and now holds them both captive — and who, inconveniently, is in love with her. Pyrrhus will spare the boy if she marries him. She refuses. He turns back to his betrothed, Hermione. Then he returns to Andromaque again. This chain of unrequited desire — Oreste loves Hermione, Hermione loves Pyrrhus, Pyrrhus loves Andromaque, Andromaque loves only the dead Hector — is the entire engine of the play. Racine wrote Andromaque in 1667, when he was thirty, and it made him famous overnight. The alexandrine verse is strict and relentless, each character arguing their case with the precision of a lawyer and the desperation of someone who knows they are losing. What distinguishes this from other tragedies is how little pity Racine allows anyone: every character is both victim and tormentor. By the final act, Pyrrhus is dead, Hermione has killed herself, and Oreste has gone mad. Andromaque survives, which in context feels like its own punishment.

No. 30 on this list. Pamela · Samuel Richardson · 1740

Pamela Andrews is fifteen years old and in service when her mistress dies and the mistress's son, Mr. B, begins a campaign to seduce her. She refuses. He escalates — intercepting her letters, relocating her to a remote estate, locking her in — and she keeps writing, to her parents and in a secret journal she hides in her clothing. What makes the novel strange is that we only have Pamela's account: earnest, relentlessly self-observing, written in the knowledge that Mr. B may one day read every word she has set down. Published in 1740, Pamela invented something — not just the epistolary novel, but the novel's peculiar project of making a single consciousness the center of a world. Richardson called his method 'writing to the moment': the heroine records events as they happen, before she knows how they will turn out. Readers have been arguing about Pamela's sincerity ever since. Henry Fielding published Shamela the following year, certain the whole performance was calculation dressed as virtue. That argument — is Pamela genuinely good, or is goodness here just the strategy that worked? — has never been settled. The novel is slow by design: captivity is repetitive, and Richardson wants you to feel it. But the compression of one young woman's inner life, the surveillance she endures and returns in kind, and the original sin of a marriage that rewards persistence over refusal make Pamela one of the most uncomfortable triumphs in English fiction.