Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature

Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature names 500 books; ReadingRate holds 257 of them, listed here. The most approachable of them is Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (difficulty 25/100, about 1.5 hours); the hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan (94/100). 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 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.6 hours
• A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958) — difficulty 45/100, about 6.5 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, 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
• 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
• Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner (1936) — difficulty 79/100, about 18 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
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998) — difficulty 55/100, about 11 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
• Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1972) — difficulty 52/100, about 14 hours
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) — difficulty 56/100, about 2.3 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara (1934) — difficulty 45/100, about 4 hours
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume (1970) — difficulty 25/100, about 1.5 hours
• Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (1925) — difficulty 45/100, about 11 hours
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) — difficulty 67/100, about 6 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
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P. Jacobs (1946) — difficulty 33/100, about 33 min
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985) — difficulty 70/100, about 13 hours
• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.5 hours
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) — difficulty 52/100, about 4.4 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945) — difficulty 55/100, about 8.1 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934) — difficulty 64/100, about 15 hours
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck (1945) — difficulty 44/100, about 3.2 hours
• Canzoniere by Petrarch (1374) — difficulty 71/100, about 4.2 hours
• Capital of Pain by Paul Éluard (1926) — difficulty 50/100, about 48 min
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) — difficulty 62/100, about 15 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927) — difficulty 45/100, about 4.5 hours
• Deliverance by James Dickey (1970) — difficulty 69/100, about 8.6 hours
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1975) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.5 hours
• Dubliners by James Joyce (1914) — difficulty 72/100, about 8.1 hours
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952) — difficulty 49/100, about 16 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
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940) — difficulty 48/100, about 12 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
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936) — difficulty 45/100, about 27 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth (1960) — difficulty 56/100, about 5.8 hours
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) — difficulty 84/100, about 52 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
• 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
• House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.6 hours
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980) — difficulty 58/100, about 4.7 hours
• Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow (1976) — difficulty 60/100, about 15 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
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) — difficulty 54/100, about 13 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
• 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
• 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
• 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, 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
• 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
• Martin Eden by Jack London (1909) — difficulty 65/100, 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
• 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs (1959) — difficulty 84/100, about 11 hours
• Native Son by Richard Wright (1940) — difficulty 58/100, about 12 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase (1939) — difficulty 31/100, about 3.8 hours
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937) — difficulty 34/100, about 1.7 hours
• On Crimes and Punishments by Cesare Beccaria (1764) — difficulty 44/100, about 2.2 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
• 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
• Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (1969) — difficulty 57/100, about 5.4 hours
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813) — difficulty 52/100, about 8.6 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960) — difficulty 56/100, about 7.5 hours
• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975) — difficulty 71/100, about 8.9 hours
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — difficulty 67/100, about 15 hours
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) — difficulty 56/100, about 4.5 hours
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1961) — difficulty 70/100, about 11 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
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) — difficulty 63/100, about 4.4 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) — difficulty 68/100, about 12 hours
• 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
• 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
• Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1979) — difficulty 70/100, about 19 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 Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1954) — difficulty 58/100, about 19 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 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 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 Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione (1528) — difficulty 62/100, about 11 hours
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) — difficulty 54/100, about 2.3 hours
• The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (1952) — difficulty 58/100, about 16 hours
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) — difficulty 58/100, about 5.7 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• 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 Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001) — difficulty 59/100, about 16 hours
• The Counterfeiters by André Gide (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) — difficulty 68/100, about 4.7 hours
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939) — difficulty 56/100, about 3.1 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 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 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 Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 36 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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 Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950) — difficulty 47/100, about 4.2 hours
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) — difficulty 62/100, about 13 hours
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1962) — difficulty 57/100, about 5.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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 Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955) — difficulty 85/100, about 70 hours
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) — difficulty 74/100, about 9.2 hours
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht (1941) — difficulty 47/100, about 1 hours
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007) — difficulty 63/100, about 5.2 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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 Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) — difficulty 80/100, about 15 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• 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, 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 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) — difficulty 63/100, about 5.3 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
• 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
• 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
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) — difficulty 63/100, about 9.4 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
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922) — difficulty 89/100, about 47 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947) — difficulty 72/100, about 16 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• 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, 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
• 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, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau (1959) — difficulty 46/100, about 2.9 hours

Questions

How many books are on Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature?

500. ReadingRate holds 257 of them, each with how hard it is to read and how long it takes.

Which book on Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature is the easiest to read?

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume, difficulty 25/100, about 1.5 hours. The hardest is Écrits by Jacques Lacan, at 94/100.

How long would it take to read every book on Open Syllabus Top 500 - Literature?

About 2,638 hours for the 256 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 1,319 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, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World. All lists.