The 100 best moderately difficult books about love and desire

No. 11 on this list. Othello · William Shakespeare · 1603

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CAPE Literatures in English – Caribbean Examinations Council, Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

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

Shakespeare took a love story between a Black general and a Venetian noblewoman and destroyed it through the most precisely engineered manipulation in dramatic literature — Iago's campaign unfolds with the logic of a chess game, each move exploiting a specific vulnerability. The play remains the most penetrating study of how jealousy, once planted, manufactures its own evidence.

No. 12 on this list. Collected Poems of W.H. Auden · W.H. Auden · 1976

One of the most important English-language poets of the twentieth century, central to the modern canon alongside Yeats and Eliot.

No. 13 on this list. Hippolytus · Euripides · c. 428 BCE

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Hippolytus is a cornerstone of classical literature curricula worldwide, appearing in virtually every Greek tragedy anthology and university drama syllabus. It is one of only 17 surviving plays by Euripides and is consistently featured in courses on Western drama, classical antiquity, and the history of theatre. No direct Open Syllabus data was available, but its canonical presence in the Western literary tradition is unambiguous.

No. 14 on this list. Middlemarch · George Eliot · 1871

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

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

Appears on 1,070 university syllabi (75th percentile by Open Syllabus), anchoring Victorian literature courses worldwide. Wikipedia covers it in 25 languages with a substantial 52,926-character article including dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections. Virginia Woolf's declaration that it is 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' has given it a persistent critical shorthand that appears on nearly every canonical 'greatest novels' list.

No. 15 on this list. The Idiot · Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Prince Myshkin steps off a train into St. Petersburg after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, cured of his epilepsy but carrying no money, no connections, and a disposition so transparently good that everyone around him assumes he is simple. He is not simple. He sees directly into people — their vanity, their suffering, their better selves — and says so without calculation, which the society he enters reads as idiocy. Within days he is entangled with two women: Nastasya Filippovna, a celebrated beauty who has been kept and ruined by a wealthy patron and who tears through every room she enters, and Aglaya Epanchina, young and proud and surrounded by suitors. Both fall in love with him. He loves both. He cannot save either. Dostoevsky set out to portray a 'positively beautiful man' and then placed him in conditions designed to break such a man apart. The question the novel drives toward — whether goodness has any purchase on the world, whether beauty can save or only destroy — is never answered. What accumulates instead is a portrait of Russian society in the 1860s: the new money, the decayed gentry, the radical youths, the drawing rooms where everyone performs and no one is seen. Myshkin alone refuses to perform, which makes him simultaneously the novel's moral center and its most helpless figure. The final scene — two men sitting in darkness beside a dead woman — is among the most harrowing endings in 19th-century fiction.

No. 16 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. 17 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. 18 on this list. Long Day's Journey into Night · Eugene O'Neill · 1956

O'Neill dramatized his own family — the morphine-addicted mother, the alcoholic father, the doomed brother — with such lacerating honesty that he ordered the play sealed until twenty-five years after his death. The result is the most autobiographically raw masterpiece in American theater, a four-act cycle of blame and forgiveness that never grants its characters the relief of a resolution.

No. 19 on this list. The Decameron · Giovanni Boccaccio · 1353

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Ten young Florentines flee the Black Death and tell a hundred stories—bawdy, tragic, satirical—that give prose fiction its first great architecture. Chaucer borrowed from it, and the frame-narrative technique Boccaccio perfected here became the scaffolding for centuries of European storytelling.

No. 20 on this list. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame · Victor Hugo · 1831

Among Hugo most famous novels. Sparked Gothic Revival and cathedral preservation movement.

No. 21 on this list. A Dream Play · August Strindberg · 1902

Recognized as one of the most important and innovative plays in Western drama. A foundational text of expressionism and the avant-garde theatre.

No. 22 on this list. Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family · Thomas Mann

A Nobel-winning author's first novel, taught widely in German and world literature courses as the model family chronicle.

No. 23 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. 24 on this list. The Seagull · Anton Chekhov · 1896

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

One of Chekhov's four major plays and a permanent part of the world repertory and of drama syllabi. Its 1898 Moscow Art Theatre revival is the founding event of that theatre, which still carries a seagull on its curtain.

No. 25 on this list. Le Morte d'Arthur · Thomas Malory · 1485

Le Morte d'Arthur is the standard English telling of the Arthurian legend and a fixture of courses on medieval and early modern English literature. It is the source most English-language readers know for Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere and the Grail quest.

No. 26 on this list. The Return of the Native · Thomas Hardy · 1878

The Return of the Native stands as one of Hardy's major tragic novels and a cornerstone of Victorian fiction. Egdon Heath's status as literary landscape rivals any in English literature, and the novel appears consistently in academic curricula and critical studies of the Victorian novel.

No. 27 on this list. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship · Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1796

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship is taught in comparative literature and world literature courses globally, and is considered essential reading for understanding the development of European prose fiction. Its position as the founding text of the Bildungsroman places it on syllabi wherever German literature or the novel as a form is studied seriously. No database signals were available, but its literary-historical importance is universally acknowledged.

No. 28 on this list. Emma · Jane Austen · 1815

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

Included in: Great Books of the Western World, Oxford World's Classics

Emma is taught in virtually every survey of British literature and appears on most lists of essential novels. It is Austen's longest and most complex work, considered by some critics her masterpiece. The novel appears in high school AP courses, undergraduate surveys, and graduate seminars. It has been adapted countless times for film and television. Its status in the Western canon is unassailable, ranking just below Pride and Prejudice in popular awareness but equal or higher in critical estimation.

No. 29 on this list. Sense and Sensibility · Jane Austen · 1811

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

Austen first published novel. Less celebrated than Pride and Prejudice or Emma but firmly canonical.

No. 30 on this list. Le Cid · Pierre Corneille · 1637

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

Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

Rodrigue has just killed a man in a duel. The man was the father of Chimène, the woman he loves. Now Chimène must demand his execution — and she does, publicly, before the king, even as she still loves him. This is the central knot of Corneille's 1637 tragicomedy, and he never loosens it: honor requires each of them to destroy the other, yet neither stops loving the other for a moment. Set in medieval Seville, Le Cid moves with the brisk efficiency of classical French theater — five acts, a single crisis, no wasted scenes. Rodrigue kills Count Gormaz to avenge his father's humiliation. He then defeats a Moorish invasion almost as an afterthought, becoming a national hero just as Chimène presses her case against him. The king delays, the Infanta nurses her own secret love for Rodrigue, and the play ends not with resolution but with a promise: wait a year, let time do its work. What makes Le Cid endure is the Cornelian dilemma at its core — the forced choice between love and duty, where doing the right thing is also the most brutal thing. Corneille gives both Rodrigue and Chimène equal moral weight. Neither is wrong. The alexandrine verse they speak is formal, even stiff to modern ears, but underneath it two people are trying to hold themselves together while being torn apart.