Penguin Modern Classics

Penguin Modern Classics names 55 books, every one 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 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (80/100).

• 1984 by George Orwell (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 6.5 hours
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962) — difficulty 54/100, about 4.1 hours
• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929) — difficulty 49/100, about 6 hours
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (1924) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.2 hours
• A Room with a View by E.M. Forster (1908) — difficulty 46/100, about 4.3 hours
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) — difficulty 56/100, about 2.3 hours
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930) — difficulty 67/100, about 6 hours
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.5 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
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) — difficulty 62/100, about 15 hours
• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957) — difficulty 56/100, about 16 hours
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952) — difficulty 49/100, about 16 hours
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944) — difficulty 61/100, about 3.3 hours
• Fires on the Plain by Shōhei Ōoka (1951) — difficulty 73/100, about 6.4 hours
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899) — difficulty 69/100, about 4 hours
• Howards End by E.M. Forster (1910) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.6 hours
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) — difficulty 69/100, about 12 hours
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954) — difficulty 65/100, about 5.8 hours
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 6.1 hours
• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938) — difficulty 59/100, about 6.7 hours
• 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
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962) — difficulty 35/100, about 3 hours
• 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
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo (1955) — difficulty 70/100, about 3.6 hours
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938) — difficulty 67/100, about 15 hours
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) — difficulty 63/100, about 4.4 hours
• Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (1947) — difficulty 46/100, about 4.2 hours
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951) — difficulty 58/100, about 5.7 hours
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983) — difficulty 49/100, about 4.6 hours
• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani (1962) — difficulty 63/100, about 6 hours
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) — difficulty 55/100, about 13 hours
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — difficulty 52/100, about 3.4 hours
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (2017) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.7 hours
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967) — difficulty 62/100, about 13 hours
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915) — difficulty 47/100, about 1.4 hours
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980) — difficulty 64/100, about 29 hours
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1953) — difficulty 42/100, about 1.7 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 Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929) — difficulty 80/100, about 15 hours
• The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942) — difficulty 64/100, about 3 hours
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) — difficulty 56/100, about 5 hours
• The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1959) — difficulty 73/100, about 27 hours
• The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925) — difficulty 71/100, about 9.2 hours
• The Waves by Virginia Woolf (1931) — difficulty 75/100, about 9.5 hours
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961) — difficulty 42/100, about 6.3 hours
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.4 hours
• 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

Questions

How many books are on Penguin Modern Classics?

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

Which book on Penguin Modern Classics is the easiest to read?

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, difficulty 34/100, about 1.7 hours. The hardest is The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, at 80/100.

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

About 438 hours for the 55 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 219 days at two hours a day.

Other lists: Penguin Classics Collection, NYRB 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.