Harvard’s Humanities 10 reading list

Harvard’s Humanities 10 is the year-long course in which first-years read a book a week, from the Odyssey in September to the Iliad in April. These are all 24 books on its 2026–27 syllabus, in the order the course sets them, each with its week, its measured difficulty and the hours an average reader takes over it.

The Wall Street Journal called the course brutal, and the numbers agree. Read whole, the 24 books come to 3.1 million words and 273 hours: about 11 hours of reading a week for 25 weeks, or an hour and a half every day. Difficulty accounts for 66 of those hours, and 13 of the books score Challenging or harder. Three weeks would take more than 30 hours each: Montaigne’s Essays, The Wealth of Nations and Dōgen’s Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. The lightest week is The Waste Land, 34 minutes of reading and the hardest book on the list, at 91 out of 100.

The course sets only parts of the longest books, so its students read less than this. The figures are for whole books, in the translation named beside each where ReadingRate knows it.

24 books · 273 hours at an average pace · difficulty 36 to 91

Fall 2026

  1. Week of 8 September: Odyssey by Homer (c. 725 BCE): difficulty 49 of 100, Moderate, about 7.8 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Odysseus takes ten years to get home from Troy while suitors fill his house. The course opens with the oldest story of a journey home. Figures from William Cullen Bryant’s translation.
  2. Week of 15 September: Oresteia by Aeschylus (c. 458 BCE): difficulty 64 of 100, Challenging, about 3.1 hours. Three plays: a king murdered by his wife, his son’s revenge, and the court that ends the chain of killing.
  3. Week of 22 September: Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580): difficulty 48 of 100, Moderate, about 34 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Montaigne tries out his own mind on everything from friendship to cannibals, and invents the essay as he goes. Figures from Charles Cotton’s translation, edited by William Carew Hazlitt.
  4. Week of 29 September: Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1601): difficulty 67 of 100, Challenging, about 3.2 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A prince told to avenge his father thinks his way past every chance to do it.
  5. Week of 6 October: Theological-Political Treatise by Baruch Spinoza (1670): difficulty 62 of 100, Challenging, about 9 hours. Spinoza reads the Bible as a historian would, and argues that a free state must leave thought free. Figures from R. H. M. Elwes’s translation.
  6. Week of 13 October: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (1776): difficulty 63 of 100, Challenging, about 33 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. How the division of labour and free exchange make a nation rich: the founding book of economics.
  7. Week of 20 October: Emma by Jane Austen (1815): difficulty 56 of 100, Challenging, about 12 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A clever young woman arranges her neighbours’ marriages and misreads nearly all of them, her own included.
  8. Week of 27 October: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818): difficulty 68 of 100, Challenging, about 8.8 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A student builds a living man and abandons him, and the creature tells his own side.
  9. Week of 3 November: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855): difficulty 53 of 100, Moderate, about 9 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Whitman’s one book, rewritten over his whole life: the poet speaking as everyone and everything in America. The syllabus names no book, only selected poems: the figures are for the whole of Leaves of Grass.
  10. Week of 10 November: On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche (1887): difficulty 68 of 100, Challenging, about 6.7 hours. Three essays on where good and evil, guilt and self-denial came from.
  11. Week of 17 November: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922): difficulty 91 of 100, Very difficult, about 34 min, free to read on ReadingRate. Eliot’s poem of a Europe broken by the war, in many voices and languages and in lines borrowed from older poems.
  12. Week of 1 December: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963): difficulty 54 of 100, Moderate, about 1.7 hours. Two essays on race and religion in America, the first a letter to his nephew.
  13. Week of 1 December: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955): difficulty 46 of 100, Moderate, about 3.5 hours. Baldwin’s first essays: his father’s death, Harlem, protest novels, and an American in Paris.

Spring 2027

  1. Weeks of 26 January and 2 February: Ulysses by James Joyce (1922): difficulty 89 of 100, Very difficult, about 47 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. One day in Dublin, 16 June 1904, told in a new style for almost every chapter. Two weeks on the syllabus, and the longest read on the list.
  2. Week of 9 February: The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf (1925): difficulty 51 of 100, Moderate, about 5 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Woolf’s essays on books and their readers, written for the reader who reads for pleasure. The syllabus names no book, only essays and stories: The Common Reader stands in.
  3. Week of 16 February: The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905): difficulty 53 of 100, Moderate, about 8.9 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Lily Bart needs a rich husband to keep her place in New York society, and keeps turning one down.
  4. Week of 23 February: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man by Friedrich Schiller (1795): difficulty 70 of 100, Difficult, about 3.8 hours. Twenty-seven letters arguing that art and play, not force, are how people become free.
  5. Week of 2 March: Tales of Moonlight and Rain by Ueda Akinari (1776): difficulty 50 of 100, Moderate, about 2.1 hours. Nine Japanese tales from 1776 of ghosts, demons and promises kept beyond death. Figures from Anthony H. Chambers’s translation, which is in copyright: ReadingRate shows its analysis, not its text.
  6. Week of 9 March: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353): difficulty 47 of 100, Moderate, about 20 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Ten young people leave plague-struck Florence and tell a hundred stories in ten days. Figures from John Payne’s translation.
  7. Week of 23 March: Treasury of the True Dharma Eye by Dōgen (1253): difficulty 74 of 100, Difficult, about 35 hours. Dōgen’s teaching on Zen practice, on time and on being, from thirteenth-century Japan. Figures from the translation edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi, which is in copyright: ReadingRate shows its analysis, not its text.
  8. Week of 30 March: Inferno by Dante Alighieri (1314): difficulty 59 of 100, Challenging, about 3 hours. Dante walks down through the nine circles of hell with Virgil as his guide, and talks with the damned.
  9. Week of 6 April: Daphnis and Chloe by Longus: difficulty 36 of 100, Easy, about 1.7 hours. Two foundlings raised by shepherds on Lesbos fall in love before they know what love is. The easiest book on the list. Figures from Rowland Smith’s translation.
  10. Week of 13 April: Symposium by Plato (c. 385 BCE): difficulty 50 of 100, Moderate, about 2.2 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. Speeches in praise of love at a dinner party, ending with Socrates and a drunk Alcibiades. Figures from Benjamin Jowett’s translation.
  11. Weeks of 20 and 27 April: Iliad by Homer (c. 750 BCE): difficulty 56 of 100, Challenging, about 11 hours, free to read on ReadingRate. A few weeks of the Trojan War and the anger of Achilles. The course ends where Greek literature begins.

Questions

What comes first?
Odyssey by Homer, set for the week of 8 September, at difficulty 49 out of 100 and about 7.8 hours for an average reader.
What is the hardest book on the list?
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, at 91 out of 100 and about 34 min for an average reader. It is set for the week of 17 November.
What is the easiest?
Daphnis and Chloe by Longus, at 36 out of 100 and about 1.7 hours. It is set for the week of 6 April.
How long does the whole list take?
About 273 hours for an average reader, who goes more slowly through the harder books. The three longest books take 117 hours of them: Ulysses (47 hours), Treasury of the True Dharma Eye (35 hours) and Essays (34 hours).
Are the figures for the whole books?
Yes. Every figure is for the whole book as ReadingRate holds it, in the translation named beside it where one is named. A course often sets only parts of the longest books, so a student may read less.
How is difficulty measured?
ReadingRate scores every book from 0 to 100 on how hard it is to read, from its prose and from what it asks of a reader. For a book of argument the score weighs how complex the argument is, what it assumes you already know, how opaque its terms are, how indirectly it makes its case and how much it tries to hold at once.

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