The 100 best moderately difficult books about identity and the self

No. 11 on this list. Three Sisters · Anton Chekhov · 1901

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

Taught in every course on modern drama and staged continuously by major companies since its 1901 Moscow Art Theatre premiere. The sisters' longing for Moscow is one of the best-known situations in world theatre.

No. 12 on this list. The Lady with the Dog · Anton Chekhov · 1899

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

Among the most anthologized and taught short stories in any language, a staple of fiction courses and writing workshops. It is frequently named as the greatest short story ever written.

No. 13 on this list. A Doll's House · Henrik Ibsen · 1879

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), Leaving Certificate English – NCCA / State Examinations Commission (Ireland)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

Ibsen made a wife walk out on her husband and children in the final scene, and the sound of that door slamming ricocheted across Europe, igniting debates about marriage, autonomy, and women's legal personhood that reshaped law and culture for the next century. The play invented modern social drama by treating a domestic argument as a political event.

No. 14 on this list. Orlando · Virginia Woolf · 1928

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

Orlando appears on university syllabi worldwide in modernist literature, gender studies, feminist theory, and LGBTQ+ studies courses — one of the few novels to anchor multiple disciplines simultaneously. It features on Modern Library's 100 Best Novels list and is discussed in virtually every survey of 20th-century British fiction. Woolf's stature guarantees its place in the canon regardless of pedagogical fashion.

No. 15 on this list. The Adventures of Augie March · Saul Bellow · 1954

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

Bellow opened the floodgates of American prose with a first sentence — "I am an American, Chicago born" — that declared the immigrant son's right to the whole language, high and low, lyrical and street-smart, in a single breath. The novel proved that the American picaresque could carry philosophical weight without sacrificing velocity, and it liberated a generation of novelists from Hemingway's tight-lipped restraint.

No. 16 on this list. A House for Mr. Biswas · V.S. Naipaul · 1961

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Naipaul tracked one man's forty-year struggle to own a house of his own in colonial Trinidad, and by treating that modest ambition with the gravity of epic, wrote the definitive novel about the immigrant's war between dignity and dispossession. Mr. Biswas's defeats are so granular and so cumulative that the house, when it finally comes, means more than any literary symbol has a right to.

No. 17 on this list. House Made of Dawn · N. Scott Momaday · 1969

House Made of Dawn appears on virtually every Native American literature syllabus and most American literature surveys covering the post-1960 period. It is the foundational text of the Native American literary renaissance and required reading in courses on multicultural American literature, modernism, and postwar fiction.

No. 18 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. 19 on this list. The Prelude · William Wordsworth · 1850

A fixture of every survey of English Romanticism and nearly every anthology of British poetry, though as a single long poem it draws less raw syllabus volume than assigned novels—closer to Beloved's discipline-specific canonicity than a mass-market fixture like Gatsby.

No. 20 on this list. Jane Eyre · Charlotte Brontë · 1847

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Appears on 6,194 university syllabi according to Open Syllabus — placing it at the 94.8th percentile — and its Wikipedia article spans 59 languages with dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections. Jane Eyre is a fixture of Victorian literature courses worldwide and features on both the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list and the BBC Big Read Top 100.

No. 21 on this list. The Wild Duck · Henrik Ibsen · 1884

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

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

The Wild Duck is a cornerstone of the Western dramatic canon, taught in virtually every university drama program and included in all standard collections of world theater. Though the database returns no syllabus count, Ibsen is the most taught non-English-language playwright in English-speaking universities, and this play—alongside Hedda Gabler and A Doll's House—appears on every major drama syllabus. It is consistently ranked among Ibsen's finest works and among the ten most important plays of the nineteenth century.

No. 22 on this list. Odyssey · Homer · c. 725 BCE

Homer invented the homecoming plot: the cunning survivor who lies, adapts, and improvises his way back to the life he left behind. Three thousand years later, every story about the long way home — from Huckleberry Finn to Star Trek — runs on the engine the Odyssey built.

No. 23 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. 24 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. 25 on this list. The Catcher in the Rye · J.D. Salinger · 1951

Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, Montenegrin literature curriculum (crnogorski jezik i književnost) (Montenegro)

Appears on 1,046 university syllabi (75th percentile per Open Syllabus) and has Wikipedia articles in 66 languages, placing it among the most-taught American novels. Listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, TIME All-TIME 100 Novels, and Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century — a fixture in American high school and university curricula since its 1951 publication.

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 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde · Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886

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

One of the most widely taught Victorian texts in English literature curricula at every level, from secondary school to university. The phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' has entered common English as a synonym for dual personality. The novella appears on virtually every list of essential 19th-century fiction and is a fixture in Gothic literature, Victorian studies, and psychology-and-literature courses worldwide.

No. 28 on this list. The Death of Artemio Cruz · Carlos Fuentes · 1962

The Death of Artemio Cruz occupies a central position in the Latin American Boom canon and appears regularly in world literature curricula alongside works by García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Cortázar. It is widely considered Fuentes's masterpiece and a defining text of mid-20th-century experimental fiction. The novel remains in continuous print in multiple languages and features prominently in scholarly studies of modernist narrative technique.

No. 29 on this list. Call to Arms · Lu Xun · 1923

Lu Xun compressed the anguish of a civilization in crisis into stories so concentrated they read like detonations — a madman who discovers that Confucian morality is a euphemism for cannibalism, a revolutionary beheaded while the crowd scrambles for bread dipped in his blood. These stories broke Chinese fiction free from classical convention and became the foundational texts of modern Chinese literature.

No. 30 on this list. The Conference of the Birds · Attar of Nishapur · 1177

Recognized as one of the greatest works of Persian literature and a foundational text of Sufism. It ranks alongside the Quran and works by Rumi in Islamic intellectual tradition. Western literary canons increasingly recognize it as essential world literature.