TIME All-TIME 100 Novels

TIME All-TIME 100 Novels names 100 books, every one listed here; ReadingRate holds 100 of them. 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 The Recognitions by William Gaddis (85/100). 32 of its books are on four or more of the eight great rankings.

• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953) — difficulty 58/100, about 19 hours
• All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) — difficulty 54/100, about 15 hours
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997) — difficulty 55/100, about 11 hours
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925) — difficulty 42/100, about 22 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
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (1957) — difficulty 53/100, about 5.7 hours
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (1939) — difficulty 58/100, about 6.2 hours
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001) — difficulty 53/100, about 8.5 hours
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987) — difficulty 58/100, about 7.5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985) — difficulty 70/100, about 13 hours
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1945) — difficulty 55/100, about 8.1 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927) — difficulty 54/100, about 2.3 hours
• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (1934) — difficulty 64/100, about 15 hours
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961) — difficulty 62/100, about 15 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951) — difficulty 58/100, about 5.7 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962) — difficulty 54/100, about 4.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1967) — difficulty 56/100, about 11 hours
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001) — difficulty 59/100, about 16 hours
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) — difficulty 68/100, about 4.7 hours
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951) — difficulty 70/100, about 7.6 hours
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939) — difficulty 56/100, about 3.1 hours
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927) — difficulty 45/100, about 4.5 hours
• A Death in the Family by James Agee (1957) — difficulty 45/100, about 6.5 hours
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938) — difficulty 71/100, about 13 hours
• Deliverance by James Dickey (1970) — difficulty 69/100, about 8.6 hours
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone (1974) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.5 hours
• Falconer by John Cheever (1977) — difficulty 51/100, about 3.9 hours
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969) — difficulty 62/100, about 12 hours
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962) — difficulty 71/100, about 28 hours
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953) — difficulty 76/100, about 10 hours
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936) — difficulty 45/100, about 27 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) — difficulty 55/100, about 13 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973) — difficulty 84/100, about 52 hours
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) — difficulty 52/100, about 3.4 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934) — difficulty 48/100, about 4.6 hours
• 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
• Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964) — difficulty 56/100, about 9.8 hours
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1980) — difficulty 58/100, about 4.7 hours
• A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul (1961) — difficulty 46/100, about 13 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934) — difficulty 49/100, about 7.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996) — difficulty 81/100, about 70 hours
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952) — difficulty 75/100, about 22 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Light in August by William Faulkner (1932) — difficulty 65/100, about 14 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950) — difficulty 33/100, about 2.1 hours
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955) — difficulty 69/100, about 12 hours, on 6 of 8 rankings
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954) — difficulty 65/100, about 5.8 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954) — difficulty 51/100, about 36 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
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940) — difficulty 57/100, about 14 hours
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981) — difficulty 67/100, about 21 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• Money by Martin Amis (1984) — difficulty 59/100, about 11 hours
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961) — difficulty 57/100, about 5.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925) — difficulty 59/100, about 7.1 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Naked Lunch by William 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
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984) — difficulty 56/100, about 5.8 hours
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005) — difficulty 57/100, about 7.2 hours
• 1984 by George Orwell (1949) — difficulty 46/100, about 6.5 hours, on 7 of 8 rankings
• 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
• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski (1965) — difficulty 56/100, about 5.8 hours
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962) — difficulty 76/100, about 9 hours
• A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (1924) — difficulty 54/100, about 7.2 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• 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
• Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990) — difficulty 60/100, about 15 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
• 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
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955) — difficulty 85/100, about 70 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
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949) — difficulty 68/100, about 9.9 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969) — difficulty 63/100, about 4.4 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (1992) — difficulty 39/100, about 9.6 hours
• 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 Sportswriter by Richard Ford (1986) — difficulty 64/100, about 13 hours
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (1963) — difficulty 61/100, about 5.6 hours
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926) — difficulty 56/100, about 5 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937) — difficulty 63/100, about 5.3 hours
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958) — difficulty 45/100, about 3.3 hours
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960) — 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
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (1934) — difficulty 63/100, about 9.4 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 Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947) — difficulty 72/100, about 16 hours, on 5 of 8 rankings
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1986) — difficulty 68/100, about 12 hours
• White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) — difficulty 65/100, about 9.4 hours
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) — difficulty 70/100, about 18 hours
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) — difficulty 64/100, about 4.3 hours, on 4 of 8 rankings

Questions

How many books are on TIME All-TIME 100 Novels?

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

Which book on TIME All-TIME 100 Novels 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 The Recognitions by William Gaddis, at 85/100.

How long would it take to read every book on TIME All-TIME 100 Novels?

About 1,139 hours for the 100 books ReadingRate measures, at 250 words a minute adjusted for each book's difficulty: 570 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, 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, Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World. All lists.