Bokklubben World Library

Bokklubben World Library names 100 books, every one listed here; ReadingRate holds 87 of them. The most approachable of them is Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren (difficulty 20/100, about 1.2 hours); the hardest is Ulysses by James Joyce (89/100). 18 of its books are on four or more of the eight great rankings.

• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) — difficulty 45/100, about 3.3 hours
• Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1835) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri — difficulty 67/100, about 11 hours
• Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous — difficulty 48/100, about 2.6 hours
• Book of Job by Anonymous — difficulty 70/100, about 1.1 hours
• One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous — difficulty 54/100, about 16 hours
• Njál's Saga by Anonymous — not on ReadingRate yet
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) — difficulty 52/100, about 8.6 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835) — difficulty 55/100, about 7.7 hours
• The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett (1951) — not on ReadingRate yet
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio — difficulty 47/100, about 20 hours
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.3 hours
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) — difficulty 73/100, about 14 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) — difficulty 64/100, about 3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Poems by Paul Celan (1952) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932) — difficulty 69/100, about 19 hours
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605) — difficulty 58/100, about 32 hours
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer — difficulty 60/100, about 23 hours
• Stories by Anton Chekhov (1886) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1904) — difficulty 70/100, about 18 hours
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (1861) — difficulty 50/100, about 12 hours
• Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot (1796) — difficulty 73/100, about 11 hours
• Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1929) — difficulty 67/100, about 12 hours
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866) — difficulty 70/100, about 24 hours
• The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1869) — difficulty 59/100, about 19 hours
• Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872) — difficulty 62/100, about 22 hours
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880) — difficulty 67/100, about 35 hours
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871) — difficulty 54/100, about 22 hours
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) — difficulty 75/100, about 22 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Medea by Euripides — difficulty 52/100, about 1.6 hours
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936) — difficulty 79/100, about 18 hours
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) — difficulty 80/100, about 15 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) — difficulty 57/100, about 9.7 hours
• Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert (1869) — difficulty 68/100, about 18 hours
• Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca (1928) — difficulty 62/100, about 2.3 hours
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967) — difficulty 55/100, about 10 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832) — difficulty 69/100, about 3.9 hours
• Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1842) — difficulty 55/100, about 10 hours
• The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959) — difficulty 73/100, about 27 hours
• The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa (1956) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Hunger by Knut Hamsun (1890) — difficulty 53/100, about 4.6 hours
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952) — difficulty 42/100, about 1.7 hours
• Iliad by Homer — difficulty 56/100, about 13 hours
• Odyssey by Homer — difficulty 56/100, about 8.7 hours
• A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen (1879) — difficulty 51/100, about 1.8 hours
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) — difficulty 89/100, about 47 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Stories by Franz Kafka (1924) — not on ReadingRate yet
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 9.2 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Castle by Franz Kafka (1926) — difficulty 72/100, about 14 hours
• Shakuntala by Kālidāsa — difficulty 50/100, about 4.5 hours
• The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata (1954) — difficulty 60/100, about 5.4 hours
• Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis (1946) — difficulty 59/100, about 8.8 hours
• Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (1913) — difficulty 50/100, about 11 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Independent People by Halldór Laxness (1934) — difficulty 72/100, about 24 hours
• Complete Poems by Giacomo Leopardi (1818) — not on ReadingRate yet
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) — difficulty 71/100, about 28 hours
• Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren (1945) — difficulty 20/100, about 1.2 hours
• Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun (1918) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz (1959) — difficulty 58/100, about 12 hours
• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901) — difficulty 58/100, about 19 hours
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) — difficulty 63/100, about 30 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) — difficulty 71/100, about 26 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580) — difficulty 48/100, about 34 hours
• History by Elsa Morante (1974) — difficulty 33/100, about 14 hours
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu — difficulty 63/100, about 8.6 hours
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930) — difficulty 70/100, about 49 hours
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) — difficulty 69/100, about 12 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 6.5 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• Metamorphoses by Ovid — difficulty 78/100, about 15 hours
• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (1982) — difficulty 81/100, about 25 hours
• Tales by Edgar Allan Poe (1832) — not on ReadingRate yet
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913) — difficulty 71/100, about 25 hours
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais (1532) — difficulty 69/100, about 33 hours
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955) — difficulty 70/100, about 3.6 hours
• Masnavi by Rumi — difficulty 64/100, about 7.9 hours
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) — difficulty 67/100, about 21 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• Bostan by Saadi — not on ReadingRate yet
• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (1966) — difficulty 65/100, about 4.8 hours
• Blindness by José Saramago (1995) — difficulty 60/100, about 9.8 hours
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1603) — difficulty 67/100, about 3.1 hours
• King Lear by William Shakespeare (1608) — difficulty 73/100, about 12 hours
• Othello by William Shakespeare (1622) — difficulty 58/100, about 2.2 hours
• Oedipus the King by Sophocles — difficulty 61/100, about 1.8 hours
• The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830) — difficulty 64/100, about 17 hours
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1760) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo (1923) — not on ReadingRate yet
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726) — difficulty 66/100, about 10 hours
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1865) — difficulty 53/100, about 39 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877) — difficulty 56/100, about 26 hours
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy (1886) — difficulty 43/100, about 1.2 hours
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884) — difficulty 52/100, about 7.5 hours
• Ramayana by Valmiki — difficulty 54/100, about 7 hours
• Aeneid by Virgil — difficulty 63/100, about 9.4 hours
• Mahabharata by Vyasa — difficulty 66/100, about 61 hours
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855) — difficulty 53/100, about 8.5 hours
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.1 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
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951) — difficulty 59/100, about 8.3 hours

Questions

How many books are on Bokklubben World Library?

100. ReadingRate holds 87 of them, each with how hard it is to read and how long it takes.

Which book on Bokklubben World Library is the easiest to read?

Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, difficulty 20/100, about 1.2 hours. The hardest is Ulysses by James Joyce, at 89/100.

How long would it take to read every book on Bokklubben World Library?

About 1,263 hours for the 87 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 631 days at two hours a day.

The list from its source, checked against a second source on 2026-11-04.

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, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature, Great Books of the Western World. All lists.