The 100 best moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and 1984 by George Orwell lead the 100 best moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books, ranked by literary regard. To start, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe is the most approachable of the highly regarded books here, about 3.3 hours to read.

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.

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No. 1 of 100

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel García Márquez · 1967

Difficulty 55/10010 hours

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About 689 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 345 days for those books.

1–10 · 74 hours

  1. No. 1 on this list. One Hundred Years of Solitude

    Gabriel García Márquez · 1967

    Challenging10 hours

    Taught in schools: Literatura, Diseño Curricular – Provincia de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    García Márquez wove a century of Latin American history into one family's story where the miraculous and the mundane coexist without explanation — ice is as wondrous as levitation. The book proved that the novel could channel an entire continent's experience in a voice that had no European precedent.

    Start this book

  2. No. 2 on this list. Things Fall Apart

    Chinua Achebe · 1958

    Moderate3.3 hours

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

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Heinemann African Writers Series

    Achebe told the story of colonialism from the inside of an Igbo village rather than from a European ship, and in doing so dismantled a century of Western fiction that had treated Africa as scenery. The novel created the template for postcolonial literature in English.

    Start this book

  3. No. 3 on this list. 1984

    George Orwell · 1949

    Moderate6.5 hours

    Taught in schools: Hungarian literature curriculum (magyar nyelv és irodalom) (Hungary), Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland), OCR GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

    Appears on 1,763 university syllabi (Open Syllabus) and Wikipedia articles in 204 languages, placing it among the most globally distributed literary works. Listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels, TIME All-TIME 100, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, and BBC Big Read Top 100 — an almost unrivaled breadth of canonical recognition spanning five decades of list-making.

    Start this book

  4. Happy Days anchors modernist and postmodern drama syllabi internationally alongside Waiting for Godot and Endgame. It is taught in theatre, English literature, and philosophy programs across Europe and North America. Wikipedia covers it in over 40 languages. It is among the most-assigned Beckett plays and appears on virtually every postwar drama reading list.

    Start this book

  5. Vonnegut unstuck his protagonist from time and used the resulting shattered chronology to convey what no linear war novel could: the way trauma scrambles cause and effect until the firebombing of Dresden and a zoo on an alien planet occupy the same plane of reality. The deadpan sentence "So it goes" after every death became the definitive literary response to mass killing.

    Start this book

  6. 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.

    Start this book

  7. Kerouac typed the ecstatic cross-country journeys of his circle into a single scroll of spontaneous prose that turned restlessness itself into a literary style and a generational identity. The novel did not just describe the Beat movement — it created its mythology, and the image of the open American highway as spiritual practice originates here.

    Start this book

  8. No. 8 on this list. The Adventures of Augie March

    Saul Bellow · 1954

    Challenging19 hours

    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.

    Start this book

  9. No. 9 on this list. A House for Mr. Biswas

    V.S. Naipaul · 1961

    Moderate13 hours

    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.

    Start this book

  10. The essential novel of violence, free will, and state control. Core text in courses on dystopian fiction and ethics. Nadsat, the invented slang, demonstrated how language shapes consciousness. Kubrick's 1971 film became inseparable from the novel.

    Start this book
11–20 · 62 hours

  1. No. 11 on this list. The Plague · Albert Camus · 1947

    Taught in schools: Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland)

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

    The Plague is taught across Europe, the Americas, and Asia in existentialism, 20th-century literature, and French literature courses. Its Wikipedia article exists in 124 languages — comparable to the reach of Kafka's The Trial and well above most postwar novels. Listed in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die and enshrined as a Penguin Modern Classic.

    Moderate6.7 hours

    Start this book

  2. No. 12 on this list. The Fall · Albert Camus · 1956

    Published 1956, The Fall holds secure position in the twentieth-century canon as Camus's most formally accomplished and philosophically complex fiction. Widely taught in philosophy and literature courses as paradigmatic existentialist text, it appears on major 'best of century' lists and maintains continuous scholarly attention. Its status benefits from Camus's Nobel Prize (1957) and from representing the mature synthesis of his philosophical fiction after The Stranger and The Plague.

    Challenging2.6 hours

    Start this book

  3. No. 13 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.

    Challenging5.6 hours

    Start this book

  4. No. 14 on this list. Animal Farm · George Orwell · 1945

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

    Included in: Great Books of the Western World

    Appears on 591 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project (69th percentile) and has Wikipedia articles in 95 languages. Listed on TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels, Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, the BBC Big Read Top 100, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die — a breadth of recognition that places it among the most reliably canonical works of 20th-century fiction.

    Challenging2.3 hours

    Start this book

  5. No. 15 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.

    Challenging22 hours

    Start this book

  6. No. 16 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.

    Challenging5.7 hours

    Start this book

  7. No. 17 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.

    Challenging9.3 hours

    Start this book

  8. No. 18 on this list. The Crucible · Arthur Miller · 1953

    Standard curriculum text in American high schools and universities, The Crucible is one of the most-assigned plays in English-speaking education. Its McCarthyism allegory gives it permanence across both literary and political syllabi, and it has been in continuous production since its 1953 premiere. The Open Syllabus Project places it among the most frequently taught dramatic works in US classrooms.

    Challenging3.1 hours

    Start this book

  9. No. 19 on this list. The Zoo Story · Edward Albee · 1959

    A foundational work of American avant-garde theater and Albee's debut. Widely taught, anthologized, and performed as a landmark one-act play.

    Challenging1.3 hours

    Start this book

  10. No. 20 on this list. Pnin · Vladimir Nabokov · 1957

    Pnin occupies established position in 20th-century literature curricula, taught as representative Nabokov and exemplary modernist treatment of exile. While less universally assigned than Lolita or Pale Fire, the novel appears regularly in Russian-American literature, American modernism, and displaced-person studies courses.

    Challenging3.8 hours

    Start this book
21–30 · 91 hours

  1. No. 21 on this list. The Bell Jar · Sylvia Plath · 1963

    The Bell Jar is required reading in virtually every American women's literature and confessional writing course, and appears widely in high school curricula addressing mental health and mid-century American life. It holds a secure place on Modern Library and similar essential reading lists, and remains one of the most assigned novels in discussions of feminist literary history.

    Challenging6.4 hours

    Start this book

  2. No. 22 on this list. The Bridge on the Drina · Ivo Andrić · 1945

    Taught in schools: Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

    Andrić's Nobel Prize-winning masterwork holds central position in Balkan literature and broader 20th-century fiction. The novel appears regularly in world literature curricula and scholarly studies of historical fiction, postcolonial literature, and European modernism. It defines the chronicle-novel form and serves as essential text for understanding Balkan cultural memory.

    Challenging11 hours

    Start this book

  3. No. 23 on this list. The Iceman Cometh · Eugene O'Neill · 1946

    The Iceman Cometh appears in the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list and holds Library of America and NYRB Classics editions — markers of canonical permanence in American letters. It is taught in virtually every American drama survey and appears on most 'great American plays' lists alongside Long Day's Journey into Night. Wikipedia carries the play in only 5 languages, reflecting the global reach of drama (versus fiction) rather than lesser standing; within American literary culture, The Iceman Cometh is firmly canonical.

    Challenging5.5 hours

    Start this book

  4. No. 24 on this list. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest · Ken Kesey · 1962

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

    The novel stands as a defining countercultural text of the 1960s, regularly taught in high schools and universities. Its critique of institutional conformity and exploration of sanity as social construct secured permanent placement in American literary canon. The work shaped cultural conversation about psychiatric power and individual freedom.

    Challenging8.3 hours

    Start this book

  5. No. 25 on this list. Brideshead Revisited · Evelyn Waugh · 1945

    The nostalgic masterpiece of English Catholicism. Charles Ryder's Oxford youth and his entanglement with the Marchmains became the definitive portrait of aristocratic decline. Core text in British literature courses.

    Moderate8 hours

    Start this book

  6. No. 26 on this list. Exercises in Style · Raymond Queneau · 1947

    A cornerstone text of postwar French avant-garde literature and the OuLiPo tradition, widely assigned in literary theory and creative writing courses. Not a household classic in the manner of Camus but firmly enshrined in academic and experimental-fiction canons worldwide.

    Challenging2.1 hours

    Start this book

  7. No. 27 on this list. The Bald Soprano · Eugène Ionesco · 1950

    The Bald Soprano appears in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century (1999) and the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list, with a Wikipedia presence in 27 languages. It is standard coursework in theater history, comparative literature, and 20th-century drama programs globally — a fixed point on any survey of modern theater. Less universally assigned than Shakespeare or Beckett's Waiting for Godot, but firmly in the canon of world drama with no serious dispute about its place there.

    Moderate3.8 hours

    Start this book

  8. No. 28 on this list. Wide Sargasso Sea · Jean Rhys · 1966

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

    The postcolonial revision that changed how we read Jane Eyre. Antoinette/Bertha's story—the madwoman in the attic given voice—became essential feminist and postcolonial criticism. Core text in Caribbean literature and courses on literary rewriting.

    Challenging4.3 hours

    Start this book

  9. No. 29 on this list. The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) · J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954

    Taught in schools: Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

    Widely taught in fantasy, medieval-influenced and popular literature courses and ranked among the most read novels, but less dominant on core literary syllabi than Gatsby or Crime and Punishment.

    Moderate34 hours

    Start this book

  10. No. 30 on this list. The Left Hand of Darkness · Ursula K Le Guin · 1969

    Genly Ai, a human envoy from a galactic coalition called the Ekumen, arrives on the planet Gethen to invite its people into interstellar fellowship. The planet is locked in an ice age, and its inhabitants possess a biology that would reshape how any visitor understands human nature: Gethenians have no fixed sex, spending most of each month in a neuter state before entering 'kemmer,' a brief fertile period during which they become randomly male or female. Genly must navigate the treacherous politics of two rival nations, Karhide and Orgoreyn, while struggling against his own deeply ingrained assumptions about gender. His most important relationship is with Estraven, a disgraced Karhidish politician whose motives Genly cannot read through the fog of his own gendered expectations. Their harrowing journey across an arctic ice sheet strips away politics, culture, and prejudice, forcing a communion between two beings who must learn to see each other without the categories that have shaped their perceptions. Le Guin constructs the novel as a mosaic of voices: Genly's diplomatic report, Estraven's spare journal, Gethenian myths and legends, and anthropological field notes, each offering a partial and unreliable perspective on a world that resists totalizing description. The prose is crystalline and unhurried, moving between political intrigue, philosophical reflection, and passages of extraordinary landscape writing as the two travelers cross the Gobrin Ice. The embedded myths refract the novel's central concerns with duality, betrayal, and the inseparability of light and darkness.

    Challenging7.4 hours

    Start this book
31–40 · 60 hours

  1. No. 31 on this list. Portnoy's Complaint

    Philip Roth · 1969

  2. No. 32 on this list. Herzog

    Saul Bellow · 1965

  3. No. 33 on this list. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

    John le Carré · 1963

  4. No. 34 on this list. Endgame

    Samuel Beckett · 1957

  5. No. 35 on this list. A Grain of Wheat

    Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 1967

    Included in: Heinemann African Writers Series

  6. No. 36 on this list. The Auroras of Autumn

    Wallace Stevens · 1950

  7. No. 37 on this list. Catch-22

    Joseph Heller · 1961

  8. No. 38 on this list. The Haunting of Hill House

    Shirley Jackson · 1959

  9. No. 39 on this list. Dance of the Happy Shades

    Alice Munro · 1968

  10. No. 40 on this list. The Sound of the Mountain

    Yasunari Kawabata · 1949

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

41–50 · 66 hours

  1. No. 41 on this list. Doctor Zhivago

    Boris Pasternak · 1957

    Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard

  2. No. 42 on this list. Exile and the Kingdom

    Albert Camus · 1957

  3. No. 43 on this list. Fahrenheit 451

    Ray Bradbury · 1953

    Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), Pacific Senior Secondary Certificate – English

  4. No. 44 on this list. Krapp's Last Tape

    Samuel Beckett · 1958

  5. No. 45 on this list. Blow-Up and Other Stories

    Julio Cortázar · 1967

  6. No. 46 on this list. Dreamtigers

    Jorge Luis Borges · 1960

  7. No. 47 on this list. Death of a Naturalist

    Seamus Heaney · 1966

  8. No. 48 on this list. Six Feet of the Country

    Nadine Gordimer · 1956

  9. No. 49 on this list. East of Eden

    John Steinbeck · 1952

  10. No. 50 on this list. All the King's Men

    Robert Penn Warren · 1946

51–60 · 92 hours

  1. No. 51 on this list. No One Writes to the Colonel

    Gabriel García Márquez · 1961

  2. No. 52 on this list. Memoirs of Hadrian

    Marguerite Yourcenar · 1951

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

  3. No. 53 on this list. The First Circle

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1968

  4. No. 54 on this list. Zorba the Greek

    Nikos Kazantzakis · 1946

    Included in: Bokklubben World Library

  5. No. 55 on this list. The Lottery and Other Stories

    Shirley Jackson · 1949

  6. No. 56 on this list. The Long Goodbye

    Raymond Chandler · 1953

  7. No. 57 on this list. Dune

    Frank Herbert · 1965

  8. No. 58 on this list. The Fixer

    Bernard Malamud · 1967

  9. No. 59 on this list. Midaq Alley

    Naguib Mahfouz · 1947

    Taught in schools: Moroccan secondary Arabic literature (Morocco)

  10. No. 60 on this list. Canto General

    Pablo Neruda · 1950

    Taught in schools: Literatura, Diseño Curricular – Provincia de Buenos Aires (Argentina), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

61–70 · 51 hours

  1. No. 61 on this list. The Woman in the Dunes

    Kobo Abe · 1962

    Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

  2. No. 62 on this list. A Wizard of Earthsea

    Ursula K Le Guin · 1968

  3. No. 63 on this list. A Personal Matter

    Kenzaburō Ōe · 1964

  4. No. 64 on this list. Rabbit, Run

    John Updike · 1960

  5. No. 65 on this list. The Old Capital

    Yasunari Kawabata · 1962

  6. No. 66 on this list. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

    Muriel Spark · 1961

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  7. No. 67 on this list. The Lonely Londoners

    Sam Selvon · 1956

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

  8. No. 68 on this list. Seize the Day

    Saul Bellow · 1956

  9. No. 69 on this list. The Berlin Stories

    Christopher Isherwood · 1945

  10. No. 70 on this list. A Death in the Family

    James Agee · 1958

71–80 · 71 hours

  1. No. 71 on this list. Ubik

    Philip K. Dick · 1969

  2. No. 72 on this list. Cat’s Cradle

    Kurt Vonnegut · 1963

  3. No. 73 on this list. Cat's Cradle

    Kurt Vonnegut · 1963

  4. No. 74 on this list. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

    Katherine Anne Porter · 1966

  5. No. 75 on this list. The Joke

    Milan Kundera · 1967

  6. No. 76 on this list. The Birthday Party

    Harold Pinter · 1957

  7. No. 77 on this list. Cat and Mouse

    Günter Grass · 1961

  8. No. 78 on this list. The Family Moskat

    Isaac Bashevis Singer · 1950

  9. No. 79 on this list. The Master of Go

    Yasunari Kawabata · 1954

  10. No. 80 on this list. The Ravishing of Lol Stein

    Marguerite Duras · 1964

81–90 · 58 hours

  1. No. 81 on this list. Goodbye, Columbus

    Philip Roth · 1960

  2. No. 82 on this list. The Martian Chronicles

    Ray Bradbury · 1950

  3. No. 83 on this list. Furor and Mystery

    René Char · 1948

  4. No. 84 on this list. Moderato Cantabile

    Marguerite Duras · 1958

  5. No. 85 on this list. The Opposing Shore

    Julien Gracq · 1951

  6. No. 86 on this list. Childhood's End

    Arthur C. Clarke · 1953

  7. No. 87 on this list. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

    Giorgio Bassani · 1962

  8. No. 88 on this list. The Guide

    R.K. Narayan · 1958

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

  9. No. 89 on this list. The Confessions of Nat Turner

    William Styron · 1968

  10. No. 90 on this list. Lucky Jim

    Kingsley Amis · 1954

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

91–100 · 64 hours

  1. No. 91 on this list. Only Yesterday

    Shmuel Yosef Agnon · 1945

  2. No. 92 on this list. The Heart of the Matter

    Graham Greene · 1948

  3. No. 93 on this list. The River Between

    Ngugi wa Thiong'o · 1965

    Taught in schools: CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

    Included in: Heinemann African Writers Series

  4. No. 94 on this list. Something Wicked This Way Comes

    Ray Bradbury · 1962

  5. No. 95 on this list. Lunch Poems

    Frank O'Hara · 1964

  6. No. 96 on this list. Loving

    Henry Green · 1945

  7. No. 97 on this list. The Assistant

    Bernard Malamud · 1957

  8. No. 98 on this list. Zazie in the Metro

    Raymond Queneau · 1959

  9. No. 99 on this list. Half a Lifelong Romance

    Eileen Chang · 1948

  10. No. 100 on this list. Enemies, A Love Story

    Isaac Bashevis Singer · 1966

About this list

These 100 books are the highest-scoring eligible moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books currently in the catalogue. About 689 hours of reading in all. Difficulty runs from 54 to 60 out of 100 for the middle half of the list; the summit is The Bell Jar at 64.

This list is ranked by literary regard, with a consistent order for equal scores. Membership follows authors and co-authors, not translators or editors. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Postwar & Mid-Century Literature as one of its primary reading domains, and only when its author’s lifetime places it in the period. Catalogue coverage and the historical canon both limit what this list can represent.

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 moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books?
By literary regard, which weighs canonical status, critical standing and influence: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1984 by George Orwell, Happy Days by Samuel Beckett and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. ReadingRate ranks 100 such books, each with a difficulty score and a reading-time estimate.
Which moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books should I read first?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. The most approachable books on this list that still carry top literary regard are Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (about 3.3 hours), The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) by J.R.R. Tolkien and Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett.
What are the shortest of the best moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books?
Among the top 25, the shortest are Happy Days by Samuel Beckett (about 46 min), The Zoo Story by Edward Albee (about 1.3 hours) and The Fall by Albert Camus (about 2.6 hours), at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty.
Which of the best moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books are the established classics?
By canonical status, how firmly a book sits in curricula, anthologies and the canon: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, 1984 by George Orwell, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut.
How long would it take to read the top ten?
About 74 hours, at an average pace of 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 38 days at two hours a day. Set your own pace on the page and the list's reading times change to it.
How hard are moderately difficult postwar and mid-century books to read?
Most of this list sits between 54 and 60 on ReadingRate's 100-point difficulty scale, where 40 to 55 is moderate. The summit is The Bell Jar at 64. 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. Lists by country, author, period, theme or difficulty keep to literature (fiction, poetry, drama and philosophy), their novels, poems and plays first and their philosophy after them; a list of a kind of book, such as memoir or criticism, keeps every book of that kind. Every list holds at most three works by one author. A book is here when ReadingRate files it under Postwar & Mid-Century Literature as one of its primary reading domains, and only when its author’s lifetime places it in the period.