NYRB Classics

NYRB Classics names 183 books, every one listed here. The most approachable of them is Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny (difficulty 25/100, about 22 min); the hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan (94/100).

• A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (1979) — difficulty 49/100, about 7.2 hours
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962) — difficulty 54/100, about 4.1 hours
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.6 hours
• A Fable by William Faulkner (1955) — difficulty 75/100, about 20 hours
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934) — difficulty 48/100, about 4.6 hours
• A House Divided by Pearl S. Buck (1935) — difficulty 38/100, about 7.8 hours
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul (1961) — difficulty 46/100, about 13 hours
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.2 hours
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929) — difficulty 57/100, about 2.8 hours
• A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell (1944) — difficulty 68/100, about 15 hours
• Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire (1913) — difficulty 55/100, about 1.4 hours
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) — difficulty 54/100, about 15 hours
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925) — difficulty 42/100, about 22 hours
• Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956) — difficulty 46/100, about 12 hours
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) — difficulty 56/100, about 2.3 hours
• Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara (1934) — difficulty 45/100, about 4 hours
• Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1925) — difficulty 45/100, about 11 hours
• Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny (1961) — difficulty 25/100, about 22 min
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939) — difficulty 58/100, about 6.2 hours
• Aurélien by Louis Aragon (1944) — difficulty 52/100, about 14 hours
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922) — difficulty 45/100, about 7.9 hours
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943) — difficulty 78/100, about 49 hours
• Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen (1968) — difficulty 51/100, about 24 hours
• Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs (1946) — difficulty 33/100, about 33 min
• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.5 hours
• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934) — difficulty 64/100, about 15 hours
• Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard (1926) — difficulty 50/100, about 48 min
• Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig (1927) — difficulty 55/100, about 1.8 hours
• Contempt by Alberto Moravia (1954) — difficulty 48/100, about 3.6 hours
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940) — difficulty 75/100, about 9.2 hours
• Deliverance by James Dickey (1970) — difficulty 69/100, about 8.6 hours
• Dubliners by James Joyce (1914) — difficulty 72/100, about 8.1 hours
• Écrits by Jacques Lacan (1966) — difficulty 94/100, about 29 hours
• Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson (1978) — difficulty 53/100, about 4.6 hours
• Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927) — difficulty 40/100, about 9.3 hours
• Enemies, A Love Story by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1966) — difficulty 51/100, about 5.2 hours
• Falconer by John Cheever (1977) — difficulty 51/100, about 3.9 hours
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.3 hours
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939) — difficulty 94/100, about 44 hours
• Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (1943) — difficulty 75/100, about 51 min
• Friday, or, The Other Island by Michel Tournier (1967) — difficulty 53/100, about 5.2 hours
• Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian (1947) — difficulty 50/100, about 3 hours
• Furor and Mystery by René Char (1948) — difficulty 59/100, about 2.4 hours
• Gaston by André Franquin (1957) — difficulty 25/100, about 15 min
• Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner (1942) — difficulty 60/100, about 9.1 hours
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953) — difficulty 76/100, about 10 hours
• Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien (1979) — difficulty 65/100, about 8.7 hours
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1960) — difficulty 56/100, about 5.8 hours
• Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949) — difficulty 69/100, about 24 hours
• Gypsy Ballads by Federico García Lorca (1928) — difficulty 62/100, about 2.3 hours
• House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.6 hours
• Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976) — difficulty 60/100, about 15 hours
• Journal by Jules Renard (1887) — difficulty 56/100, about 26 hours
• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932) — difficulty 69/100, about 19 hours
• Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte (1944) — difficulty 76/100, about 18 hours
• Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (1928) — difficulty 50/100, about 7.9 hours
• Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier (1913) — difficulty 47/100, about 4.3 hours
• Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec (1978) — difficulty 73/100, about 21 hours
• Long Day's Journey into Night by Eugene O'Neill (1956) — difficulty 53/100, about 4.6 hours
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad (1900) — difficulty 63/100, about 11 hours
• Loving by Henry Green (1945) — difficulty 54/100, about 5.1 hours
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 6.1 hours
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1857) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (1920) — difficulty 52/100, about 11 hours
• Man's Fate by André Malraux (1933) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.4 hours
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos (1925) — difficulty 76/100, about 16 hours
• Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars (1926) — difficulty 51/100, about 4.4 hours
• Mourning Becomes Electra by Eugene O'Neill (1931) — difficulty 57/100, about 4.4 hours
• Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (1971) — difficulty 60/100, about 7.8 hours
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.1 hours
• Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot (1935) — difficulty 57/100, about 1.7 hours
• Nadja by André Breton (1928) — difficulty 59/100, about 2.8 hours
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939) — difficulty 31/100, about 3.8 hours
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962) — difficulty 56/100, about 8.3 hours
• One of Ours by Willa Cather (1923) — difficulty 46/100, about 8.2 hours
• Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet (1943) — difficulty 76/100, about 13 hours
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962) — difficulty 76/100, about 9 hours
• Paroles by Jacques Prévert (1946) — difficulty 37/100, about 1.3 hours
• Pasmore by David Storey (1972) — difficulty 52/100, about 3.4 hours
• Picture Palace by Paul Theroux (1978) — difficulty 55/100, about 6.3 hours
• Play It as It Lays by Joan Didion (1970) — difficulty 58/100, about 2.5 hours
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — difficulty 67/100, about 15 hours
• Sanctuary by William Faulkner (1931) — difficulty 64/100, about 7.4 hours
• Saville by David Storey (1976) — difficulty 54/100, about 14 hours
• Seamarks by Saint-John Perse (1957) — difficulty 68/100, about 5.1 hours
• Second Thoughts by Michel Butor (1956) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.4 hours
• Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (1956) — difficulty 57/100, about 2.9 hours
• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello (1921) — difficulty 64/100, about 1.9 hours
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) — difficulty 68/100, about 12 hours
• Sula by Toni Morrison (1973) — difficulty 58/100, about 3.7 hours
• Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947) — difficulty 46/100, about 4.2 hours
• Tarantula by Bob Dylan (1971) — difficulty 67/100, about 2.8 hours
• The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar (1968) — difficulty 60/100, about 11 hours
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (1957) — difficulty 53/100, about 5.7 hours
• The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco (1950) — difficulty 54/100, about 3.9 hours
• The Ballad of the Salty Sea by Hugo Pratt (1967) — difficulty 53/100, about 1 hours
• The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood (1945) — difficulty 54/100, about 9.5 hours
• The Blue Lotus by Hergé (1936) — difficulty 31/100, about 26 min
• The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970) — difficulty 59/100, about 4.2 hours
• The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952) — difficulty 58/100, about 16 hours
• The Centaur by John Updike (1964) — difficulty 61/100, about 8 hours
• The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970) — difficulty 70/100, about 19 hours
• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1966) — difficulty 55/100, about 9.2 hours
• The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (1972) — difficulty 58/100, about 16 hours
• The Counterfeiters by André Gide (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia (1961) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.5 hours
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947) — difficulty 30/100, about 5.4 hours
• The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor (1962) — difficulty 53/100, about 8 hours
• The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer (1980) — difficulty 55/100, about 26 hours
• The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1950) — difficulty 60/100, about 19 hours
• The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (1967) — difficulty 55/100, about 7.4 hours
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969) — difficulty 62/100, about 12 hours
• The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare (1963) — difficulty 64/100, about 6.9 hours
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) — difficulty 71/100, about 28 hours
• The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931) — difficulty 50/100, about 7.2 hours
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973) — difficulty 63/100
• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940) — difficulty 54/100, about 8.6 hours
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948) — difficulty 54/100, about 6.8 hours
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979) — difficulty 66/100, about 4.5 hours
• The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono (1951) — difficulty 41/100, about 8.7 hours
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902) — difficulty 38/100, about 3.6 hours
• The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill (1946) — difficulty 63/100, about 5.4 hours
• The Interrogation by J.M.G. Le Clézio (1963) — difficulty 61/100, about 6.7 hours
• The Joke by Milan Kundera (1967) — difficulty 56/100, about 7 hours
• The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965) — difficulty 73/100, about 12 hours
• The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975) — difficulty 52/100, about 7.5 hours
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950) — difficulty 33/100, about 2.1 hours
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) — difficulty 35/100, about 60 min
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll (1974) — difficulty 56/100, about 3.3 hours
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924) — difficulty 63/100, about 30 hours
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940) — difficulty 57/100, about 14 hours
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (1930) — difficulty 70/100, about 49 hours
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) — difficulty 62/100, about 13 hours
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926) — difficulty 51/100, about 4.6 hours
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980) — difficulty 64/100, about 29 hours
• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke (1910) — difficulty 60/100, about 6 hours
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953) — difficulty 42/100, about 1.7 hours
• The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq (1951) — difficulty 59/100, about 8 hours
• The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault (1966) — difficulty 83/100, about 24 hours
• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951) — difficulty 67/100, about 29 hours
• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (1965) — difficulty 56/100, about 5.8 hours
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940) — difficulty 55/100, about 5.5 hours
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961) — difficulty 63/100, about 3.5 hours
• The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (1964) — difficulty 60/100, about 3.6 hours
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht (1941) — difficulty 47/100, about 1 hours
• The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 29 hours
• The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel (1929) — difficulty 59/100, about 11 hours
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) — difficulty 58/100, about 27 hours
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) — difficulty 68/100, about 9.9 hours
• The Silence of the Sea by Vercors (1942) — difficulty 47/100, about 49 min
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth (1960) — difficulty 73/100, about 39 hours
• The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (1977) — difficulty 72/100, about 8.1 hours
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.6 hours
• The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979) — difficulty 61/100, about 28 hours
• The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon (1931) — difficulty 34/100, about 2.6 hours
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) — difficulty 64/100, about 3 hours
• The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.8 hours
• The Tendrils of the Vine by Colette (1908) — difficulty 42/100, about 1.6 hours
• The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud (1938) — difficulty 74/100, about 11 hours
• The Town by Conrad Richter (1951) — difficulty 33/100, about 4.5 hours
• The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor (1959) — difficulty 54/100, about 13 hours
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 9.2 hours
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) — difficulty 44/100, about 4.4 hours
• The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter (1961) — difficulty 59/100, about 2.9 hours
• The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck (1961) — difficulty 74/100, about 11 hours
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf (1906) — difficulty 38/100, about 9.2 hours
• Them by Joyce Carol Oates (1970) — difficulty 56/100, about 9.3 hours
• Thérèse Desqueyroux by François Mauriac (1927) — difficulty 60/100, about 3.9 hours
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) — difficulty 45/100, about 3.3 hours
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud (1905) — difficulty 65/100, about 5 hours
• Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck (1935) — difficulty 51/100, about 3.8 hours
• Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955) — difficulty 61/100, about 14 hours
• Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute (1939) — difficulty 77/100, about 1.4 hours
• Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) — difficulty 60/100, about 5.4 hours
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.8 hours
• Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos (1926) — difficulty 52/100, about 5.4 hours
• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1953) — difficulty 74/100, about 2.4 hours
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869) — difficulty 53/100, about 39 hours
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) — difficulty 64/100, about 4.3 hours
• Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes (1953) — difficulty 66/100, about 2.9 hours
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) — difficulty 73/100, about 14 hours
• Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959) — difficulty 46/100, about 2.9 hours

Questions

How many books are on NYRB Classics?

183, all of them listed here with how hard each is to read and how long it takes.

Which book on NYRB Classics is the easiest to read?

Asterix the Gaul by René Goscinny, difficulty 25/100, about 22 min. The hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan, at 94/100.

How long would it take to read every book on NYRB Classics?

About 1,750 hours for the 182 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 875 days at two hours a day.

Other lists: Penguin Classics Collection, Penguin Modern Classics, Everyman's Library, Library of America, Biblioteca Ayacucho, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Heinemann African Writers Series, Oxford World's Classics, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. All lists.