The 100 best easy books about identity and the self

No. 11 on this list. Sister Carrie · Theodore Dreiser · 1900

Appears on 1,040 university syllabi and sits on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels list. It is a standard text for American naturalism and the Gilded Age city.

No. 12 on this list. Sizwe Bansi Is Dead · Athol Fugard · 1972

One of the most important plays in South African theatrical history and a central work of anti-apartheid literature. Widely performed and taught internationally.

No. 13 on this list. Return to Haifa · Ghassan Kanafani · 1969

Taught in schools: Moroccan secondary Arabic literature (Morocco)

One of the foundational texts of Palestinian literature and one of the most widely read Arabic novellas worldwide.

No. 14 on this list. A Man of the People · Chinua Achebe · 1966

Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

Included in: Heinemann African Writers Series

"A Man of the People" appears regularly on university syllabi in African literature, postcolonial studies, and world literature courses, though it occupies a secondary position relative to Achebe's "Things Fall Apart," which is among the most taught novels globally. The book's prophetic publication date—released the same day as Nigeria's first military coup—secured it a place in literary history beyond its syllabus presence. It is standard reading in courses on African political fiction and postcolonial satire.

No. 15 on this list. The City and the Dogs · Mario Vargas Llosa · 1963

Recognized as one of the founding novels of the Latin American boom and a landmark of Peruvian literature.

No. 16 on this list. Memed, My Hawk · Yasar Kemal · 1955

Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

The foundational novel of modern Turkish literature's international reputation. Widely translated and studied as a masterpiece of Turkish fiction.

No. 17 on this list. This Side of Paradise · F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1920

Taught in American literature surveys and Fitzgerald-specific courses, but far less frequently than The Great Gatsby, which dominates both high school and university syllabi. This Side of Paradise appears primarily in courses on modernism, the 1920s, or the American bildungsroman. It holds a secure but secondary position in the Fitzgerald canon — the book that made him famous rather than the book that made him permanent.

No. 18 on this list. The Earthsea Quartet · Ursula K Le Guin · 1968

Across four novels spanning decades, Le Guin builds the archipelago of Earthsea—a world of islands, sailing, and true-name magic where knowing a thing's true name gives power over it. A Wizard of Earthsea follows the young wizard Ged as he releases a shadow-creature and must pursue it across the world. The Tombs of Atuan follows a priestess freed from underground servitude. The Farthest Shore follows Ged, now Archmage, pursuing a wizard who has broken the boundary between life and death. Tehanu, written sixteen years later, returns to Earthsea with a feminist perspective, following the abused child Therru and the former priestess Tenar in a world where women's power has been systematically suppressed. Le Guin's magic system—where speaking a true name is the fundamental magical act—is the most elegant in fantasy. The prose is spare, rhythmic, and precise, closer to myth than novel.

No. 19 on this list. A Lost Lady · Willa Cather · 1923

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

One of Cather's most celebrated novels, widely anthologized and taught. F. Scott Fitzgerald admired it greatly.

No. 20 on this list. Deep Rivers · José María Arguedas · 1958

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

The central work of indigenist literature in Latin America and a cornerstone of Peruvian fiction.

No. 21 on this list. The Land at the End of the World · Antonio Lobo Antunes · 1979

A Portuguese military doctor sits in a Lisbon bar late at night, talking at a woman who says nothing. For the next two hundred pages he doesn't stop. What pours out is the twenty-seven months he spent as an army psychiatrist in Angola during Portugal's colonial war — the bodies, the malaria, the boredom, the complicity — braided with memories of a Lisbon childhood lived in the shadow of Salazar's dictatorship and the bourgeois Catholic family that produced him. The zoo near his parents' apartment returns again and again: the animals behind wire, the very upright black roller-skating instructor tracing his slow ellipses, the solitude of the giraffe. The zoo is not a metaphor he explains. It is simply there, and the reader assembles what it means. Antunes writes in a single sustained torrent — no chapters, no scene breaks, no mercy. The syntax piles subordinate clause on subordinate clause until a sentence has carried you from a specific smell in Angolan scrub to a childhood memory of an aunt's apartment to a direct address back to the silent woman and her motionless hands. The narrator presents himself as tender, self-aware, a victim. The text contradicts him at every turn. He watched things happen that he did not stop. Originally published in 1979 as Os Cus de Judas — a title the English publisher softened — this is the novel that announced Antunes as the defining voice of post-colonial Portuguese literature. It reads like Faulkner set in the ruins of empire, with the guilt turned inward until it can't be contained.

No. 22 on this list. Tracks · Louise Erdrich · 1988

A central work in Erdrich's interconnected cycle and widely taught in American literature courses. Considered one of her strongest early novels.

No. 23 on this list. The Golden Pot · E.T.A. Hoffmann · 1814

One of the masterpieces of German Romanticism and Hoffmann's most celebrated tale. Widely studied in German literature courses.

No. 24 on this list. A Universal History of Infamy · Jorge Luis Borges · 1935

Borges's first fiction collection and the origin of his narrative method. Important in the Borges canon but overshadowed by Ficciones and The Aleph.

No. 25 on this list. Adam Bede · George Eliot · 1859

Adam Bede appears regularly on Victorian literature and 19th-century British fiction syllabi at universities worldwide, and is the standard entry point to George Eliot's work in courses that cannot assign the longer Middlemarch. It is included in most survey courses of the Victorian novel. Its canonical status within the Eliot corpus is secondary only to Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss, but within the broader Victorian canon it holds a secure if not dominant position — consistently anthologized, consistently in print, and consistently cited as a foundational work of Victorian realism.

No. 26 on this list. Our Twisted Hero · Yi Munyol · 1987

One of the most widely read and taught works of modern Korean literature, both domestically and in translation.

No. 27 on this list. The Art of Love · Ovid · 2

One of Ovid's most famous works, notorious in its own time and frequently censored, now recognized as a masterpiece of ironic didactic poetry.

No. 28 on this list. The Book of Three · Lloyd Alexander · 1964

Newbery Medal winner (for The High King). The Chronicles of Prydain are a cornerstone of children's fantasy.

No. 29 on this list. Dirty Hands · Jean-Paul Sartre · 1948

One of the most performed French plays of the twentieth century and a staple of political theater. Widely taught in philosophy and literature courses.

No. 30 on this list. Monster · Walter Dean Myers · 1999

Steve Harmon is sixteen years old and on trial for felony murder. He may have acted as a lookout for a Harlem drugstore robbery that left the owner dead — or he may not have. The question hangs over Walter Dean Myers's 1999 novel, which Steve narrates in the only form that makes sense to him: a screenplay. He writes himself as the protagonist, titles the film Monster — the word the prosecutor used to describe him — and cuts between courtroom scenes and flashback journal entries while his mother cries in the gallery and his lawyer calculates the odds. The form is not a gimmick. A screenplay externalizes action and dialogue while burying interiority in stage directions, and that gap is exactly where Myers puts the book's central problem: we watch Steve perform innocence without ever being certain whether we are watching performance or truth. The trial exposes Harlem's carceral machinery — the way young Black men get classified, processed, and destroyed — but Monster refuses to let that machinery fully explain Steve. He asks, on the last page, who he is. Myers doesn't answer. Readers will spend time after the last page deciding whether that's evasion or honesty, and what it says about how they read a defendant's face.