The 100 best easy literary novels

Each point of light is one of the 100, placed by how hard it is to read. The brighter, the higher it ranks. The dotted line is one way up.

100
books
578
hours to read
18
free to read here
Start low: Charlotte's WebSee all 100
Very Easy3 booksEasy59 booksModerate38 books

Tap a light to see its book · tap a cluster to keep only its books

No. 1 of 100

The Peloponnesian War

Thucydides · c. 411 BCE

Difficulty 35/10012 hours

Open the book
SortAs rankedEasiest firstShortest first
Readable here · 18

Hours at an average pace

Showing 100 books

About 578 hours for 100 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use 250 words a minute, adjusted for each book's difficulty. At 2 hours a day, about 290 days for those books.

1–10 · 40 hours

  1. A foundation text of Western thought, assigned across classics, history, political science and international relations, and a fixture of Great Books programs. The U.S. Naval War College has built its strategy teaching around it since the 1970s.

    Read now

  2. No. 2 on this list. All Quiet on the Western Front

    Erich Maria Remarque · 1987

    Easy4.3 hours

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

    One of the essential WWI novels, taught in literature and history courses worldwide.

    Start this book

  3. Ah Q stands with Quixote, Oblomov, and Babbitt as literature's archetypal national figures. For modern Chinese literature, this text functions as foundational myth—the work that demonstrated vernacular Chinese could carry savage social critique and established Lu Xun as the tradition's father.

    Start this book

  4. No. 4 on this list. Kokoro

    Natsume Sōseki · 1914

    Moderate4.5 hours

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

    Kokoro is universally regarded as the supreme masterpiece of modern Japanese literature and one of the most important novels of the twentieth century in any language. It is the single most commonly assigned novel in Japanese high schools and universities, and appears on literature syllabi worldwide. It has been continuously in print since 1914 and has been translated into dozens of languages. It is a permanent fixture of every serious list of world literature, from the Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics catalogs to Harold Bloom's discussions of global literary achievement.

    Start this book

  5. No. 5 on this list. The War of the Worlds

    H.G. Wells · 1898

    Moderate4.4 hours

    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.

    Read now

  6. No. 6 on this list. Of Mice and Men

    John Steinbeck · 1937

    Easy1.7 hours

    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.

    Start this book

  7. 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.

    Start this book

  8. 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.

    Start this book

  9. 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.

    Start this book

  10. 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.

    Start this book
11–20 · 77 hours

  1. No. 11 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.

    Easy7.1 hours

    Read now

  2. No. 12 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.

    Moderate1.7 hours

    Start this book

  3. No. 13 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.

    Easy1.7 hours

    Read now

  4. No. 14 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.

    Moderate1.2 hours

    Start this book

  5. No. 15 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.

    Moderate14 hours

    Start this book

  6. No. 16 on this list. A Hero of Our Time · Mikhail Lermontov · 1840

    A Hero of Our Time is the foundational text of Russian psychological prose and is taught in virtually every Russian literature survey course worldwide. The database shows no Open Syllabus data, but the novel's position in the Russian literary canon — alongside Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky — is unambiguous; it is typically included in world literature curricula and is required reading in Russian secondary and university education. Wikipedia covers the work extensively in dozens of languages. Its canonical status in Russian literature is comparable to The Great Gatsby's position in American literature.

    Moderate3.7 hours

    Start this book

  7. No. 17 on this list. The Captain's Daughter · Alexander Pushkin · 1836

    The Captain's Daughter anchors the Russian literary canon alongside Eugene Onegin. It appears in virtually every Russian literature survey course worldwide, is part of the secondary school curriculum in Russia, and has been continuously in print since 1836. No syllabus data was returned from the database, but its foundational status in Slavic studies is unambiguous.

    Easy2.5 hours

    Start this book

  8. No. 18 on this list. The Arabian Nights · Anonymous

    The Nights are a cornerstone of world literature and widely taught in comparative and Middle Eastern literature courses, though this 2004 edition is one of many renderings.

    Moderate18 hours

    Start this book

  9. No. 19 on this list. The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays · Oscar Wilde · 1898

    No syllabus or Wikipedia-language data turned up in this database pass, but The Importance of Being Earnest is a fixture of English-language secondary and university curricula worldwide and one of the most frequently produced plays in the English repertoire, with multiple film adaptations (1952, 1992, 2002) keeping it in general circulation. That level of sustained institutional presence puts it near To Kill a Mockingbird's curriculum-fixture status, even without syllabus counts to confirm it directly.

    Moderate6.9 hours

    Start this book

  10. No. 20 on this list. Fortunata and Jacinta · Benito Pérez Galdós · 1887

    Universally recognized as the masterpiece of Spanish realism and one of the great European novels of the nineteenth century.

    Easy20 hours

    Start this book
21–30 · 60 hours

  1. No. 21 on this list. Fortress Besieged · Qian Zhongshu · 1947

    One of the most celebrated Chinese novels of the twentieth century. Adapted into a hugely popular TV series in 1990.

    Moderate6.8 hours

    Start this book

  2. No. 22 on this list. Uncle Tom's Cabin · Harriet Beecher Stowe · 1852

    Uncle Tom's Cabin holds essential historical status in American literature and history curricula. Lincoln's alleged remark—'So this is the little lady who started this great war'—marks its political impact. The novel appears on lists of books that changed America, taught in courses on 19th-century literature, abolitionism, and protest fiction. Its canonical position rests on historical consequence more than literary innovation.

    Moderate11 hours

    Read now

  3. No. 23 on this list. Wise Blood · Flannery O'Connor · 1952

    A landmark of Southern Gothic fiction and American literature, widely taught and critically analyzed. One of the defining novels of postwar American fiction.

    Moderate3.5 hours

    Start this book

  4. No. 24 on this list. Ivanhoe · Walter Scott · 1819

    Ivanhoe is a fixture of British Romantic literature curricula and appears on virtually every survey of the historical novel as the genre's foundational text in English. While syllabus data was not captured in the database, the novel's Wikipedia article spans well over 50 languages and it remains one of the most recognized works of 19th-century British fiction. It gave the English language the cultural template for medieval chivalry — the Crusades, Normans vs. Saxons, Robin Hood — that persists in popular imagination today.

    Easy11 hours

    Start this book

  5. No. 25 on this list. This Earth of Mankind · Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 1980

    Taught in schools: Indonesian sastra curriculum

    The most important work of Indonesian literature. Perennial Nobel candidate.

    Easy6.4 hours

    Start this book

  6. No. 26 on this list. The Time of the Doves · Mercè Rodoreda · 1962

    The undisputed masterpiece of twentieth-century Catalan literature. Widely translated and recognized as one of the great European novels of the postwar period.

    Easy3 hours

    Start this book

  7. No. 27 on this list. Charlotte's Web · E.B. White · 1952

    One of the most widely assigned books in American elementary and middle school curricula, read by tens of millions of children since 1952. Appears on virtually every list of essential American children's literature. Wikipedia articles exist in 30+ languages, reflecting global reach across generations.

    Very Easy1.6 hours

    Start this book

  8. No. 28 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.

    Easy9.4 hours

    Read now

  9. No. 29 on this list. The Diary of a Young Girl · Anne Frank · 1947

    The diary is a fixture of secondary education worldwide and appears in 72 Wikipedia language editions — on par with The Great Gatsby — reflecting its global canonical reach. Its 133 Open Syllabus appearances (53rd percentile) undercount its true presence, as it is taught most heavily at the pre-university level. Le Monde named it one of the 100 Books of the Century in 1999.

    Easy5.4 hours

    Start this book

  10. No. 30 on this list. Ethan Frome · Edith Wharton · 1911

    One of the most widely assigned American novels, a staple of high school and college curricula. A central text of American literary realism.

    Easy1.7 hours

    Start this book
31–40 · 60 hours

  1. No. 31 on this list. Cousin Bette

    Honoré de Balzac · 1846

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

  2. No. 32 on this list. A Christmas Carol / The Chimes / The Cricket on the Hearth

    Charles Dickens

  3. No. 33 on this list. Men in the Sun

    Ghassan Kanafani · 1963

  4. No. 34 on this list. The Travels of Marco Polo

    Marco Polo · 1300

  5. No. 35 on this list. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

    Haruki Murakami · 1994

  6. No. 36 on this list. Treasure Island

    Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

  7. No. 37 on this list. Little Women (Little Women, #1)

    Louisa May Alcott · 1868

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

  8. No. 38 on this list. To Kill a Mockingbird

    Harper Lee · 1961

    Taught in schools: Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English (0475), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  9. No. 39 on this list. Foundation and Empire

    Isaac Asimov · 1952

  10. No. 40 on this list. Return to Haifa

    Ghassan Kanafani · 1969

    Taught in schools: Moroccan secondary Arabic literature (Morocco)

41–50 · 58 hours

  1. No. 41 on this list. Kolyma Tales

    Varlam Shalamov · 1978

  2. No. 42 on this list. Our Town

    Thornton Wilder · 1938

    Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  3. No. 43 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

  4. No. 44 on this list. The Unwomanly Face of War

    Svetlana Alexievich · 1985

    Taught in schools: Lithuanian literature curriculum (lietuvių kalba ir literatūra), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

  5. No. 45 on this list. The Moon and the Bonfires

    Cesare Pavese · 1950

  6. No. 46 on this list. Family

    Ba Jin · 1933

  7. No. 47 on this list. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

    Mark Twain · 1876

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

  8. No. 48 on this list. The City and the Dogs

    Mario Vargas Llosa · 1963

  9. No. 49 on this list. All the Pretty Horses

    Cormac McCarthy · 1992

  10. No. 50 on this list. Jenny

    Sigrid Undset · 1911

51–60 · 56 hours

  1. No. 51 on this list. Arrowsmith

    Sinclair Lewis · 1925

  2. No. 52 on this list. The Adventures of Pinocchio

    Carlo Collodi · 1883

  3. No. 53 on this list. Night on the Galactic Railroad

    Kenji Miyazawa · 1934

  4. No. 54 on this list. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

    Mildred D. Taylor · 1976

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council, Singapore-Cambridge GCE O-Level Literature in English (2065)

  5. No. 55 on this list. The Last Day of a Condemned Man

    Victor Hugo · 1829

  6. No. 56 on this list. History: A Novel

    Elsa Morante · 1974

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

  7. No. 57 on this list. Memed, My Hawk

    Yasar Kemal · 1955

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

  8. No. 58 on this list. Botchan

    Natsume Sōseki · 1906

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

  9. No. 59 on this list. Death on the Installment Plan

    Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1936

  10. No. 60 on this list. This Side of Paradise

    F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1920

61–70 · 49 hours

  1. No. 61 on this list. A Lost Lady

    Willa Cather · 1923

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

  2. No. 62 on this list. The Little Prince

    Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · 1943

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

  3. No. 63 on this list. The Way We Live Now

    Anthony Trollope · 1875

  4. No. 64 on this list. Deep Rivers

    José María Arguedas · 1958

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

  5. No. 65 on this list. Essays in Idleness

    Yoshida Kenko · 1332

  6. No. 66 on this list. The Land at the End of the World

    Antonio Lobo Antunes · 1979

  7. No. 67 on this list. Tracks

    Louise Erdrich · 1988

  8. No. 68 on this list. Dear Life

    Alice Munro · 2012

  9. No. 69 on this list. The Golden Pot

    E.T.A. Hoffmann · 1814

  10. No. 70 on this list. A Universal History of Infamy

    Jorge Luis Borges · 1935

71–80 · 70 hours

  1. No. 71 on this list. Manon Lescaut

    Abbé Prévost · 1731

    Taught in schools: Programme de français, lycée général et technologique (France)

  2. No. 72 on this list. The First Men in the Moon

    H.G. Wells · 1901

  3. No. 73 on this list. Adam Bede

    George Eliot · 1859

  4. No. 74 on this list. Julie, or the New Heloise

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1761

  5. No. 75 on this list. Waverley

    Walter Scott · 1814

  6. No. 76 on this list. Our Twisted Hero

    Yi Munyol · 1987

  7. No. 77 on this list. Thérèse Raquin

    Émile Zola · 1867

  8. No. 78 on this list. Odessa Tales

    Isaac Babel · 1931

  9. No. 79 on this list. The Stechlin

    Theodor Fontane · 1898

  10. No. 80 on this list. Anne of Green Gables

    L.M. Montgomery · 1908

81–90 · 61 hours

  1. No. 81 on this list. The Screwtape Letters

    C.S. Lewis · 1942

  2. No. 82 on this list. Dirty Hands

    Jean-Paul Sartre · 1948

  3. No. 83 on this list. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

    Mordecai Richler · 1959

  4. No. 84 on this list. Journey to the Center of the Earth

    Jules Verne · 1864

  5. No. 85 on this list. Master and Man

    Leo Tolstoy · 1895

  6. No. 86 on this list. Monster

    Walter Dean Myers · 1999

  7. No. 87 on this list. The House of the Seven Gables

    Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1851

  8. No. 88 on this list. The Golovlyov Family

    Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin · 1880

  9. No. 89 on this list. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon

    Jorge Amado · 1958

  10. No. 90 on this list. An American Tragedy

    Theodore Dreiser · 1925

91–100 · 49 hours

  1. No. 91 on this list. The Jungle

    Upton Sinclair · 1906

  2. No. 92 on this list. The Female Man

    Joanna Russ · 1975

  3. No. 93 on this list. The Call of the Wild

    Jack London · 1903

  4. No. 94 on this list. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

    Ernest J. Gaines · 1982

  5. No. 95 on this list. The Castle of Otranto

    Horace Walpole · 1764

  6. No. 96 on this list. Devdas

    Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay · 1917

  7. No. 97 on this list. Elmer Gantry

    Sinclair Lewis · 1927

  8. No. 98 on this list. The Second World War

    John Keegan · 1989

  9. No. 99 on this list. Tonio Kröger

    Thomas Mann · 1903

  10. No. 100 on this list. Malgudi Days

    R.K. Narayan · 1943

About this list

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible easy literary novels currently in the catalogue. By literary regard, it opens with The Peloponnesian War, All Quiet on the Western Front and The True Story of Ah Q. About 578 hours of reading in all. Difficulty runs from 33 to 42 out of 100 for the middle half of the list; the summit is Arrowsmith at 45.

This list is ranked by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent, and genre labels are the catalogue’s own, gathered into broader kinds.

When we matched the Canons dataset to our catalogue in October 2026, our canonical-status scores rose with the number of school curricula, publisher series and lists in it that cite a work: the median score was 72 for books one such source cites, 84 at two, 88 at three, 92 at four and 93 at five or more. Prizes are left out of that count. Outside the state curricula, the dataset’s sources choose mostly from what has been translated into English or French, so it is a weaker check on other literatures. Source: Canons (Andrew Piper), CC BY 4.0

Questions people actually ask

What are the best easy literary novels?
By literary regard, which weighs canonical status, critical standing and influence, The Peloponnesian War, All Quiet on the Western Front, The True Story of Ah Q, Kokoro and The War of the Worlds lead. ReadingRate ranks 100 such books, each with a difficulty score and a reading-time estimate.
Where should I start with easy literary novels?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. The most approachable books on this list that still carry top literary regard are Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (about 1.6 hours), All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
How hard are easy literary novels to read?
Most of this list sits between 33 and 42 on ReadingRate's 100-point difficulty scale, where 40 to 55 is moderate. The summit is Arrowsmith 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. A list that is not a genre list keeps to literature (fiction, poetry, drama and philosophy), with philosophy taking no more than one slot in five while there is literature left to rank; every list holds at most three works by one author.