ReadingRate · Best Books · 2026

The 100 best books of all time

ReadingRate's hand-curated global canon of 100 books, with difficulty and reading-time estimates where measured.

This is ReadingRate's hand-curated global canon of 100 books. The editorial ordering is preserved here.

The global ranking is hand-curated. Literary-regard data provides context; applying filters switches to a separate computed ranking across the eligible catalogue.

About 1,126 hours for 99 of 100 books with measured lengths. Estimates use a 250-word-per-minute baseline adjusted for each book's difficulty. At two hours a day, about 564 days for those books.

1–10

  1. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1601, difficulty 6.7/10, 2.8 hours)
  2. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1320, difficulty 6.7/10, 8.2 hours)
  3. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922, difficulty 8.9/10, 30 hours)
  4. Iliad by Homer (-750, difficulty 5.6/10, 13 hours)
  5. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605, difficulty 5.8/10, 29 hours)
  6. King James Bible by Anonymous (1611, difficulty 6.0/10, 1.6 hours)
  7. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913, difficulty 7.1/10, 19 hours)
  8. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869, difficulty 5.3/10, 38 hours)
  9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967, difficulty 5.5/10, 10 hours)
  10. King Lear by William Shakespeare (1606, difficulty 7.3/10, 9.1 hours)

11–20

  1. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871, difficulty 5.4/10, 21 hours)
  2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851, difficulty 7.1/10, 17 hours)
  3. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922, difficulty 9.2/10, 51 min)
  4. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866, difficulty 7.0/10, 18 hours)
  5. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880, difficulty 6.7/10, 27 hours)
  6. Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667, difficulty 6.9/10, 6.8 hours)
  7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857, difficulty 7.1/10, 10 hours)
  8. The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830, difficulty 6.4/10, 14 hours)
  9. 1984 by George Orwell (1949, difficulty 4.6/10, 6.5 hours)
  10. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915, difficulty 4.7/10, 1.4 hours)

21–30

  1. Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988, difficulty 5.8/10, 6.9 hours)
  2. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929, difficulty 8.0/10, 10 hours)
  3. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (-429, difficulty 6.1/10, 1.6 hours)
  4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813, difficulty 5.2/10, 13 hours)
  5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925, difficulty 5.2/10, 3.4 hours)
  6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953, difficulty 7.5/10, 16 hours)
  7. Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832, difficulty 6.9/10, 3.1 hours)
  8. Aeneid by Virgil (-19, difficulty 6.3/10, 8.3 hours)
  9. Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (1791, difficulty 7.8/10, 69 hours)
  10. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (1400, difficulty 6.0/10, 17 hours)

31–40

  1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884, difficulty 5.2/10, 7.4 hours)
  2. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu (1010, difficulty 6.3/10, 7.5 hours)
  3. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958, difficulty 4.5/10, 3.3 hours)
  4. Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953, difficulty 7.4/10, 1.8 hours)
  5. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861, difficulty 5.0/10, 12 hours)
  6. The Prelude by William Wordsworth (1850, difficulty 5.6/10, 4.4 hours)
  7. Complete Poems by John Keats (1820, difficulty 5.6/10, 5.7 hours)
  8. Masnavi by Rumi (1273, difficulty 6.4/10, 5.7 hours)
  9. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924, difficulty 6.3/10, 22 hours)
  10. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862, difficulty 6.4/10, 39 hours)

41–50

  1. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, difficulty 5.9/10, 6.5 hours)
  2. The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942, difficulty 6.4/10, 2.6 hours)
  3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847, difficulty 5.4/10, 11 hours)
  4. The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov (1904, difficulty 5.0/10, 1.1 hours)
  5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847, difficulty 7.3/10, 9.6 hours)
  6. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899, difficulty 6.9/10, 3.1 hours)
  7. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (180, difficulty 4.1/10, 5 hours)
  8. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926, difficulty 5.6/10, 4.8 hours)
  9. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855, difficulty 5.3/10, 8.5 hours)
  10. Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944, difficulty 6.1/10, 2.8 hours)

51–60

  1. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842, difficulty 5.5/10, 9.1 hours)
  2. Analects by Confucius (-479, difficulty 5.1/10, 2 hours)
  3. Tao Te Ching by Laozi (-400, difficulty 6.4/10, 3.5 hours)
  4. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818, difficulty 6.8/10, 6.3 hours)
  5. Metamorphoses by Ovid (8, difficulty 7.8/10, 10 hours)
  6. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955, difficulty 6.9/10, 9.1 hours)
  7. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981, difficulty 6.7/10, 15 hours)
  8. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985, difficulty 7.0/10, 9.5 hours)
  9. The Bacchae by Euripides (-405, difficulty 4.6/10, 1.3 hours)
  10. Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous (-2100, difficulty 4.8/10, 2.6 hours)

61–70

  1. Oresteia by Aeschylus (-458, difficulty 6.4/10, 1.9 hours)
  2. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939, difficulty 5.5/10, 11 hours)
  3. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (1944, difficulty 5.4/10, 5.8 hours)
  4. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972, difficulty 6.2/10, 1.9 hours)
  5. Mahabharata by Vyasa (-400, difficulty 6.6/10, 50 hours)
  6. Ramayana by Valmiki (-500, difficulty 5.4/10, 8.2 hours)
  7. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969, difficulty 6.3/10, 3.7 hours)
  8. The Tower by William Butler Yeats (1928, difficulty 5.6/10, 41 min)
  9. Candide by Voltaire (1759, difficulty 6.2/10, 5.9 hours)
  10. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932, difficulty 5.2/10, 4.3 hours)

71–80

  1. Beowulf by Anonymous (1000, difficulty 5.8/10, 3.1 hours)
  2. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973, difficulty 6.3/10)
  3. The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun (1921, difficulty 3.8/10, 1.5 hours)
  4. Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956, difficulty 5.3/10, 5 hours)
  5. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1974, difficulty 8.4/10, 34 hours)
  6. A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1879, difficulty 5.1/10, 1.9 hours)
  7. Essays: First and Second Series by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844, difficulty 5.6/10, 10 hours)
  8. Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580, difficulty 4.8/10, 34 hours)
  9. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982, difficulty 8.1/10, 16 hours)
  10. Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (1914, difficulty 4.1/10, 4.5 hours)

81–90

  1. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850, difficulty 7.2/10, 7.1 hours)
  2. White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985, difficulty 6.5/10, 8 hours)
  3. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996, difficulty 8.1/10, 43 hours)
  4. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954, difficulty 4.9/10, 12 hours)
  5. My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (2003, difficulty 6.3/10, 14 hours)
  6. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004, difficulty 7.5/10, 35 hours)
  7. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001, difficulty 7.4/10, 7 hours)
  8. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726, difficulty 6.6/10, 8.6 hours)
  9. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957, difficulty 5.4/10, 6.9 hours)
  10. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (1353, difficulty 4.7/10, 20 hours)

91–100

  1. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835, difficulty 5.5/10, 7.4 hours)
  2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961, difficulty 4.2/10, 5.6 hours)
  3. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924, difficulty 5.4/10, 6.1 hours)
  4. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972, difficulty 5.8/10, 15 hours)
  5. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959, difficulty 7.3/10, 18 hours)
  6. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719, difficulty 3.7/10, 7.1 hours)
  7. The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse (1943, difficulty 6.5/10, 15 hours)
  8. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962, difficulty 5.4/10, 4 hours)
  9. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937, difficulty 6.3/10, 4.5 hours)
  10. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854, difficulty 5.8/10, 8.3 hours)

Questions people actually ask

What are the best books of all time?
By literary regard — canonical status, critical acclaim, and influence — the top of the list runs to works like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ulysses, War and Peace, and The Divine Comedy. ReadingRate ranks 100 such works, each with difficulty and reading-time data.
How is this list ranked?
The global canon is hand-ranked by ReadingRate. Filtered lists are computed separately from literary-regard scores across the eligible catalogue.
Are these books hard to read?
Many are, and the list says so instead of pretending otherwise. Every entry carries a difficulty score out of 100 across nine dimensions, so you can pick a great book at a difficulty you'll actually finish.
Where should I start with the classics?
Start from difficulty, not from rank. Sort for acclaimed books scored as accessible — Pride and Prejudice reads far more easily than Ulysses — and work upward as your comfort grows. That's what the difficulty scores on this list are for.