1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die names 1,001 books; ReadingRate holds 96 of them, listed here. The most approachable of them is Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (difficulty 34/100, about 1.7 hours); the hardest is Ulysses by James Joyce (89/100). 46 of its books are on four or more of the eight great rankings.

• 1984 by George Orwell (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 6.5 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962) — difficulty 54/100, about 4.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958) — difficulty 45/100, about 6.5 hours
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (1961) — difficulty 46/100, about 13 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.2 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916) — difficulty 78/100, about 11 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998) — difficulty 55/100, about 11 hours
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) — difficulty 56/100, about 2.3 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) — difficulty 67/100, about 6 hours
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001) — difficulty 53/100, about 8.5 hours
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse (1966) — difficulty 63/100, about 8.3 hours
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985) — difficulty 70/100, about 13 hours
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) — difficulty 52/100, about 4.4 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone (1936) — difficulty 60/100, about 8.5 hours
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945) — difficulty 55/100, about 8.1 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) — difficulty 62/100, about 15 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (1945) — difficulty 54/100, about 6.3 hours
• Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini (1941) — difficulty 68/100, about 4.8 hours
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1975) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.5 hours
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940) — difficulty 48/100, about 12 hours
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936) — difficulty 45/100, about 27 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) — difficulty 84/100, about 52 hours
• Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow (1959) — difficulty 61/100, about 11 hours
• Herzog by Saul Bellow (1965) — difficulty 56/100, about 9.8 hours
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980) — difficulty 58/100, about 4.7 hours
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934) — difficulty 49/100, about 7.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1953) — difficulty 75/100, about 22 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984) — difficulty 57/100, about 5.1 hours
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) — difficulty 54/100, about 13 hours
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.9 hours
• Light in August by William Faulkner (1932) — difficulty 65/100, about 14 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) — difficulty 69/100, about 12 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900) — difficulty 63/100, about 11 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954) — difficulty 65/100, about 5.8 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) — difficulty 67/100, about 21 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) — difficulty 71/100, about 26 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Native Son by Richard Wright (1940) — difficulty 58/100, about 12 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) — difficulty 57/100, about 7.2 hours
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) — difficulty 34/100, about 1.7 hours
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957) — difficulty 54/100, about 8.1 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962) — difficulty 56/100, about 8.3 hours
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) — difficulty 55/100, about 10 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi (1994) — difficulty 59/100, about 3.6 hours
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) — difficulty 52/100, about 8.6 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — difficulty 67/100, about 15 hours
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961) — difficulty 70/100, about 11 hours
• Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally (1982) — difficulty 53/100, about 9.9 hours
• Silence by Shūsaku Endō (1966) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.3 hours
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) — difficulty 63/100, about 4.4 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence (1913) — difficulty 50/100, about 11 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Sophie's Choice by William Styron (1980) — difficulty 59/100, about 12 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1883) — difficulty 37/100, about 2.4 hours
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1921) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.1 hours
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) — difficulty 53/100, about 4.6 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000) — difficulty 74/100, about 21 hours
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) — difficulty 58/100, about 5.7 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983) — difficulty 49/100, about 4.6 hours
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• The Conformist by Alberto Moravia (1951) — difficulty 61/100, about 7.1 hours
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001) — difficulty 59/100, about 16 hours
• The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia (1961) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.5 hours
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969) — difficulty 62/100, about 12 hours
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (1962) — difficulty 63/100, about 6 hours
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997) — difficulty 62/100, about 8.2 hours
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) — difficulty 55/100, about 13 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — difficulty 52/100, about 3.4 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (2017) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.7 hours
• The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958) — difficulty 64/100, about 7.7 hours
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 36 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) — difficulty 63/100, about 30 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1962) — difficulty 57/100, about 5.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980) — difficulty 64/100, about 29 hours
• The Plague by Albert Camus (1947) — difficulty 53/100, about 6.7 hours
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) — difficulty 74/100, about 9.2 hours
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007) — difficulty 63/100, about 5.2 hours
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) — difficulty 68/100, about 9.9 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) — difficulty 80/100, about 15 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) — difficulty 64/100, about 3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) — difficulty 56/100, about 5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 9.2 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961) — difficulty 42/100, about 6.3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.4 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Two Women by Alberto Moravia (1957) — difficulty 49/100, about 6.3 hours
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) — difficulty 89/100, about 47 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947) — difficulty 72/100, about 16 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997) — difficulty 64/100, about 25 hours
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) — difficulty 53/100, about 39 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) — difficulty 65/100, about 9.4 hours
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) — difficulty 64/100, about 4.3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009) — difficulty 60/100, about 18 hours
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) — difficulty 73/100, about 14 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo (1923) — difficulty 70/100, about 15 hours

Questions

How many books are on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die?

1,001. ReadingRate holds 96 of them, each with how hard it is to read and how long it takes.

Which book on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is the easiest to read?

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, difficulty 34/100, about 1.7 hours. The hardest is Ulysses by James Joyce, at 89/100.

How long would it take to read every book on 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die?

About 1,093 hours for the 96 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 547 days at two hours a day.

Other lists: Modern Library 100 Best Novels, TIME All-TIME 100 Novels, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, BBC Big Read Top 100, Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature, Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World. All lists.