The 100 best easy books about youth and innocence

No. 11 on this list. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · Mark Twain · 1876

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

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been required reading in American middle and high schools for generations and appears on virtually every major list of American literature. Though university curricula tend to favor its sequel Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer remains among the most widely read 19th-century American novels worldwide, with translations across dozens of languages.

No. 12 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. 13 on this list. Death on the Installment Plan · Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1936

Considered one of the great French novels of the twentieth century, though less widely read than Journey to the End of the Night. Central to studies of literary modernism.

No. 14 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. 15 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. 16 on this list. The Little Prince · Antoine de Saint-Exupéry · 1943

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

One of the most translated books in history with over 300 language editions, making it among the most widely read works of French literature. A staple of French school curricula and taught globally in world literature, philosophy, and children's literature courses. Wikipedia articles exist in well over 100 languages, reflecting universal cultural penetration.

No. 17 on this list. Dear Life · Alice Munro · 2012

Munro's final collection, published the year before her Nobel Prize. Regarded as a fitting capstone to one of the great careers in short fiction.

No. 18 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. 19 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. 20 on this list. Anne of Green Gables · L.M. Montgomery · 1908

Anne of Green Gables holds a secure place in the literary canon as one of the most enduring works of children's and young adult fiction. First published in 1908, it has never gone out of print, has been translated into over 36 languages, and has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. It is widely taught in schools across Canada and globally, and its protagonist Anne Shirley has become a mythic icon of Canadian culture — a figure of comparable recognizability to Alice in Wonderland. While it sits firmly in the popular/children's classics tier rather than the prestige 'Great Books' canon, its canonical standing within its genre and cultural sphere is unassailable.

No. 21 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.

No. 22 on this list. Paroles · Jacques Prévert · 1946

Ranked 16th on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, Paroles is one of the best-selling books of French poetry of the twentieth century, and poems such as 'Barbara' and 'Déjeuner du matin' are fixtures of French schooling. It is less often set in university poetry courses than Apollinaire or Éluard.

No. 23 on this list. Tonio Kröger · Thomas Mann · 1903

One of Mann's most beloved early works and a key text in the literature of the artist's self-understanding.

No. 24 on this list. Brown Girl Dreaming · Jacqueline Woodson · 2014

Brown Girl Dreaming is standard reading in American middle school and high school curricula, particularly in units on memoir, poetry, and Civil Rights-era literature. It appears on numerous recommended reading lists for young adults and is included in many school districts' required reading programs. Its canonical status is strong within YA and middle-grade education but has not yet reached the broader university literary canon.

No. 25 on this list. The Eye of the World · Robert Jordan · 1990

The Eye of the World launched one of fantasy's most influential series. While not considered literary fiction, it holds canonical status within the epic fantasy genre, frequently cited alongside Tolkien's work as foundational to modern fantasy.

No. 26 on this list. The Old Curiosity Shop · Charles Dickens · 1841

The Old Curiosity Shop appears in every major Dickens collected edition (Penguin Classics, Oxford World's Classics, Chapman and Hall) and is taught in Victorian literature courses at universities worldwide. Nell's death was one of the most discussed literary events of the 19th century, with contemporary accounts of readers in tears on both sides of the Atlantic. It sits below Oliver Twist and Great Expectations in the teaching hierarchy but is a firm fixture of the Dickens canon.

No. 27 on this list. Where the Wild Things Are · Maurice Sendak · 1963

Max puts on his wolf suit and makes mischief of one kind and another until his mother calls him "WILD THING" and sends him to bed without his supper. His room grows into a forest, an ocean tumbles by, and Max sails to the place where the wild things are—huge, yellow-eyed, horn-headed monsters who roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth. Max tames them with a magic trick of staring into their eyes without blinking, and they make him king of all wild things. The wild rumpus follows: a wordless bacchanal across three double-page spreads of pure, joyous destruction. Then Max smells good things to eat and wants to be where someone loves him best of all. He sails home and finds his supper waiting, still hot. Sendak compressed into 338 words and ten sentences the entire emotional arc of childhood anger: the rage, the fantasy of power, the satiation of wildness, and the return to love. The illustrations expand as Max's fantasy grows—from small vignettes to borderless full pages—and contract as he returns, a visual rhythm that mirrors the emotional one. The book was controversial upon publication for its refusal to punish Max's anger and has since become the most influential picture book of the 20th century.

No. 28 on this list. The Secret Garden · Frances Hodgson Burnett · 1911

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

The Secret Garden has stayed in print since 1911 and remains a staple of children's classics lists and school reading across the English-speaking world. The Common Core State Standards (2010) name it among their text exemplars for upper-elementary grades, and it is regularly set in children's literature courses.

No. 29 on this list. The Summer Book · Tove Jansson · 1972

Increasingly recognized as a Scandinavian masterpiece. A quiet classic with a devoted readership.

No. 30 on this list. Sanshiro · Natsume Sōseki · 1908

A key Soseki novel and an important document of Meiji-era Japan's encounter with modernity.