Reading List
to Read, and Where to Start
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” Italo Calvino wrote. Most lists of classics give you a hundred titles and no way in. This one has 33, from Pride and Prejudice in 1813 to Beloved in 1987, and tells you honestly how long and how hard each one is, where to start for the kind of reader you are, and which famous ones to leave for later. Six of them are on my own shelf.
By Lisanne Swart · 33 classics · 1813–1987 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
These are 33 classic books to read, oldest to newest, each marked short, medium or long and easy, medium or hard. If you have never read a classic, start with Rebecca or Pride and Prejudice; if you want something under 250 pages, The Great Gatsby or The Stranger. 16 of the 33 are by women. Below: where to start by mood, the short ones, and five giants to save for later.
What makes a book a classic?
A classic is a book that people keep reading long after the moment it was written for has passed, because it still tells them something true about how people behave. Age alone is not enough: most books from 1850 are forgotten. What the books on this page share is that each one changed what novels could do, or what readers thought they could say out loud, and is still read for pleasure, not only in classrooms.
Every book below has two labels. Length is short (under 250 pages), medium (250 to 450) or long (over 450), because page counts differ by edition. Difficulty is how much work the book asks of a modern reader: easy, medium or hard. Hard does not mean worse. It means: give it time.
Where to start, by the kind of reader you are
If you have never read a classic
→ Rebecca (1938) — it reads like a thriller, because it is one.
If you want a love story
→ Pride and Prejudice (1813) — then Jane Eyre.
If you want to understand what drives people
→ Crime and Punishment (1866) — then Madame Bovary.
If you only have a weekend
→ The Great Gatsby (1925) — or The Stranger, both under 200 pages.
If you want something unsettling
→ The Lottery (1948) — one sitting, and you will think about it for days.
If you want a big book to live in
→ Middlemarch (1871) — or Anna Karenina.
The 33 classics at a glance
| # | Book | Length · Difficulty | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Pride and PrejudiceJane Austen · 1813 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 02 | FrankensteinMary Shelley · 1818 | Medium · Medium | Amazon |
| 03 | Jane EyreCharlotte Brontë · 1847 | Long · Medium | Amazon |
| 04 | Wuthering HeightsEmily Brontë · 1847 | Medium · Medium | Amazon |
| 05 | Madame BovaryGustave Flaubert · 1857 | Medium · Medium | Amazon |
| 06 | Great ExpectationsCharles Dickens · 1861 | Long · Medium | Amazon |
| 07 | Crime and PunishmentFyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 | Long · Hard | Amazon |
| 08 | Little WomenLouisa May Alcott · 1868 | Long · Easy | Amazon |
| 09 | MiddlemarchGeorge Eliot · 1871 | Long · Hard | Amazon |
| 10 | Anna KareninaLeo Tolstoy · 1878 | Long · Medium | Amazon |
| 11 | The Picture of Dorian GrayOscar Wilde · 1890 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 12 | The AwakeningKate Chopin · 1899 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 13 | The House of MirthEdith Wharton · 1905 | Medium · Medium | Amazon |
| 14 | Mrs DallowayVirginia Woolf · 1925 | Short · Hard | Amazon |
| 15 | The Great GatsbyF. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 16 | Letters to a Young PoetRainer Maria Rilke · 1929 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 17 | PassingNella Larsen · 1929 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 18 | Their Eyes Were Watching GodZora Neale Hurston · 1937 | Short · Medium | Amazon |
| 19 | Of Mice and MenJohn Steinbeck · 1937 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 20 | RebeccaDaphne du Maurier · 1938 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 21 | The StrangerAlbert Camus · 1942 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 22 | Man’s Search for MeaningViktor Frankl · 1946 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 23 | The LotteryShirley Jackson · 1948 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 24 | Nineteen Eighty-FourGeorge Orwell · 1949 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 25 | Lord of the FliesWilliam Golding · 1954 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 26 | LolitaVladimir Nabokov · 1955 | Medium · Hard | Amazon |
| 27 | Giovanni’s RoomJames Baldwin · 1956 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 28 | Things Fall ApartChinua Achebe · 1958 | Short · Easy | Amazon |
| 29 | To Kill a MockingbirdHarper Lee · 1960 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 30 | The Bell JarSylvia Plath · 1963 | Medium · Easy | Amazon |
| 31 | Wide Sargasso SeaJean Rhys · 1966 | Short · Medium | Amazon |
| 32 | One Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel García Márquez · 1967 | Medium · Hard | Amazon |
| 33 | BelovedToni Morrison · 1987 | Medium · Hard | Amazon |
Oldest to newest. Tap a title to jump to the full entry.
33 classic books to read, oldest to newest
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters with no fortune, meets the rich and rude Mr Darcy at a country ball and decides she has him figured out. Austen published it anonymously, as “by the author of Sense and Sensibility”.
Why read itThe best first classic there is. Everyone in it is judging someone too quickly, and the whole book is about what it costs to admit you were wrong.
Frankenstein
A young scientist builds a living man from dead bodies and runs from what he has made. Shelley started the story at eighteen, during a ghost-story contest with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley at Lake Geneva in 1816, and it was first published anonymously.
Why read itNot a monster story but a story about a creature nobody will look at, and a maker who will not take responsibility. It reads differently every decade.
Jane Eyre
An orphan survives a cruel aunt and a harsh charity school, becomes governess at Thornfield Hall and falls in love with its owner, Mr Rochester, who is hiding something in the attic. It was published under the name Currer Bell.
Why read itA first-person voice that still feels startlingly direct: a poor, plain young woman who insists on being treated as an equal. Start here if you want a classic with a plot that pulls.
Wuthering Heights
On the Yorkshire moors, the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw grow up inseparable, and when she marries someone else his revenge stretches across two generations. Emily Brontë’s only novel, published as Ellis Bell.
Why read itRead it as a book about obsession, not romance. Nobody in it is likeable, and that is exactly why people still argue about it.
Madame Bovary
Emma Bovary, married to a dull country doctor, tries to live the life she read about in romantic novels, through affairs and debt. After it was serialised in 1856, Flaubert was tried for offending public morals and acquitted, and it appeared as a book in 1857.
Why read itThe original novel about wanting a bigger life than the one you have. Choose a modern translation, such as Lydia Davis’s.
Great Expectations
Pip, an orphan apprenticed to a blacksmith, is given money by a secret benefactor and sent to London to become a gentleman, and grows ashamed of everyone who loved him. It ran weekly in Dickens’s own magazine before it became a book.
Why read itThe most compact of the big Dickens novels and the best place to start with him. Miss Havisham, in her rotting wedding dress, is unforgettable.
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov, a poor former student in St Petersburg, kills a pawnbroker to prove he is the kind of man who is allowed to, and spends the rest of the novel falling apart. It was serialised in 1866.
Why read itThe best book ever written about the gap between what you think you could do and what it does to you. It moves faster than its reputation.
Little Women
Four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, grow up in Massachusetts while their father is away at the Civil War. Published in two parts in 1868 and 1869, and drawn from Alcott’s own family.
Why read itStill the book people give to sisters. Jo, who wants to write and does not want to marry, is the character half its readers grew up wanting to be.
Middlemarch
In a Midlands town around 1830, the idealistic Dorothea Brooke marries a dry old scholar and a young doctor marries the wrong woman, and the whole town watches. It came out in eight parts in 1871 and 1872.
Why read itLong and slow to start, and the most generous novel about ordinary people in English. Save it for when you have a quiet month.
Anna Karenina
Anna, married to a senior official in St Petersburg, falls in love with Count Vronsky and leaves her marriage, while in the countryside Levin looks for a way to live honestly. Serialised from 1875, published as a book in 1878.
Why read itIt opens with one of the most quoted first lines in fiction and earns it. Easier than its length suggests, because Tolstoy makes everyone understandable.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait would age instead of him, and it does, recording every cruelty he commits. Wilde’s only novel appeared in a magazine in 1890 and, expanded, as a book in 1891; it was used against him at his trials.
Why read itA short, witty book about what happens when you are never made to look at yourself. Half the lines are still quoted.
The Awakening
On a summer holiday on the Louisiana coast, Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother, realises she does not want the life she has. Reviewers condemned it, and Chopin published very little afterwards.
Why read itA slim book that was a scandal in 1899 and reads as if it was written now. Read it in an afternoon.
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is beautiful, twenty-nine and running out of money in New York high society, where a woman’s only career is a good marriage, and she keeps hesitating at the moment she should say yes.
Why read itWharton is the sharpest writer about money and status this side of Austen, and much darker. Few endings in fiction hit harder.
Mrs Dalloway
One June day in London in 1923: Clarissa Dalloway buys flowers for her party, and across the city Septimus Smith, a soldier back from the war, struggles to hold on. The story moves from mind to mind without warning.
Why read itShort, but it asks you to read differently. Give it the first twenty pages; after that the way it moves between people is the point.
The Great Gatsby
Nick Carraway rents a house on Long Island next to Jay Gatsby, who throws enormous parties in the hope that Daisy Buchanan, the woman he lost years ago, will walk in. It sold poorly in Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
It’s the shortest book I know about wanting something your whole life. Gatsby has the house, the shirts and the parties, and still spends his nights looking at one light across the water. If you’ve ever built a plan around one person, or one version of yourself, you’ll recognise him before you like him.
— LisanneLetters to a Young Poet
Ten letters Rilke wrote between 1903 and 1908 to Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen-year-old military cadet who had sent him his poems. Kappus published them in 1929, three years after Rilke died.
Why read itThe shortest book on this page, and the one people underline most. It is about writing, and really about how to live with questions you cannot answer yet.
Passing
Two light-skinned Black women who grew up together meet by chance in 1920s Chicago: Irene, who lives in Harlem, and Clare, who has been passing as white and is married to a racist man who does not know.
Why read itBarely a hundred and fifty pages, and so tense it reads like a thriller. A classic that was nearly forgotten and should never have been.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford tells her friend the story of her three marriages, from a farm in West Florida to an all-Black town and the Everglades, and of finding her own voice along the way. The dialogue is written in dialect.
Why read itThe dialect takes a few pages to hear; read the first chapter aloud if it helps. Then it is one of the most alive voices in American fiction.
Of Mice and Men
George and Lennie, two migrant ranch workers in Depression-era California, share a dream of owning a small farm. Lennie is enormously strong and does not understand his own strength.
Why read itA classic you can read in one sitting, and one of the most often banned books in American schools. It is about loneliness more than anything.
Rebecca
A shy young woman, never named, marries the widower Maxim de Winter and arrives at Manderley, where his first wife, Rebecca, is everywhere, especially in the housekeeper Mrs Danvers. It opens with “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Why read itThe classic for people who think they do not like classics. It reads like a psychological thriller because it is one.
The Stranger
Meursault, a clerk in Algiers, does not cry at his mother’s funeral, kills a man on a beach soon after, and is tried as much for the first as for the second. Also published in English as The Outsider.
Why read itSimple sentences, very strange effect. A short way into a big question: what do people expect you to feel, and what happens when you do not.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, survived Auschwitz and subcamps of Dachau and wrote this within a year of liberation: what he saw of how people endured the camps, and the therapy he built from it. The English edition appeared in 1959.
Why read itThe one non-fiction book on this page and the one I would hand to anyone. It is short, and the question it leaves you with does not go away.
The Lottery
On a sunny June morning, the people of a small village gather in the square for their annual lottery. It appeared in The New Yorker in 1948, drew a flood of angry letters, and was collected in The Lottery and Other Stories in 1949.
Everyone in this village is pleasant. The children are just out of school for the summer, the men talk about planting and rain, and a woman hurries into the square drying her hands, because she forgot what day it was. The story never raises its voice, not even on the last page.
— LisanneNineteen Eighty-Four
Winston Smith rewrites old newspapers for the Ministry of Truth in a state where Big Brother is always watching, and starts a forbidden diary and a forbidden love affair. Orwell finished it while seriously ill on the Scottish island of Jura.
Why read itThe book that gave us “Big Brother”, “doublethink” and “thoughtcrime”. Read it for what it says about how people are made to doubt what they saw.
Lord of the Flies
A plane carrying British schoolboys crashes on an uninhabited island. They elect Ralph as leader and try to keep a signal fire going, until Jack and his hunters offer something more exciting than rescue. Golding’s first novel was turned down by many publishers.
Why read itStill the most argued-about school text in English. Read it as an adult and it is about how fast a group turns, not about boys.
Lolita
Humbert Humbert, a European scholar, tells in his own seductive voice how he abused a twelve-year-old girl, Dolores Haze, across America. First published in Paris in 1955, and in the United States in 1958.
It is one of the most disturbing books I have read, and one of the best written. Nabokov lets you enjoy Humbert’s sentences, then makes you see what those sentences are hiding. It taught me how a manipulator sounds from the inside.
— LisanneGiovanni’s Room
David, a young American in Paris waiting for his fiancée to return, falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian barman, and cannot bear what that says about him. Baldwin later said his publisher told him to burn it.
Why read itShort, intense and written in some of the most beautiful sentences of the century. It is about what we lose when we are afraid of who we are.
Things Fall Apart
Okonkwo is a respected wrestler and farmer in an Igbo village in what is now Nigeria, driven by fear of being weak like his father, when British missionaries and colonial officials arrive. Achebe’s first novel.
Why read itOne of the most widely read African novels in the world, and a corrective to every European classic that described Africa from the outside.
To Kill a Mockingbird
In 1930s Alabama, Scout Finch, aged six, watches her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch, defend a Black man, Tom Robinson, falsely accused of raping a white woman. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.
Why read itTold by a child, so it is easy to read and hard to forget. Read it now alongside the criticism that it centres a white hero, and it gets more interesting.
The Bell Jar
Esther Greenwood, a gifted student, wins a summer internship at a New York magazine in 1953 and comes home to a depression that takes over her life. Plath’s only novel was first published in London under the name Victoria Lucas.
Why read itFunny and sharp before it is dark, which is what makes it so true. One of the most honest novels about depression ever written.
Wide Sargasso Sea
The life of Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress in post-slavery Jamaica, who is married off to an Englishman, renamed and taken to England. She is the woman in the attic in Jane Eyre.
Why read itRead it straight after Jane Eyre, and you will never read that novel the same way again.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, a town they founded in the Colombian swamps, where a girl ascends to heaven while folding sheets and it rains for four years, eleven months and two days.
Why read itKeep a note of who is who: half the men are called Aureliano or José Arcadio. After that it is pure pleasure.
Beloved
Years after escaping slavery, Sethe lives in a house in Ohio haunted by the daughter she killed rather than let her be taken back. Then a young woman called Beloved arrives. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Why read itThe newest book here, and already a classic by every measure. It is hard going in places, on purpose; let it come at you in pieces.
Short classics you can finish in a weekend
14 of the 33 books on this page are under 250 pages. If you are getting back into reading, these are the ones to carry around.
- The Awakening — Kate Chopin, 1899 · easy
- Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf, 1925 · hard
- The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925 · easy
- Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke, 1929 · easy
- Passing — Nella Larsen, 1929 · easy
- Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston, 1937 · medium
- Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck, 1937 · easy
- The Stranger — Albert Camus, 1942 · easy
- Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl, 1946 · easy
- The Lottery — Shirley Jackson, 1948 · easy
- Lord of the Flies — William Golding, 1954 · easy
- Giovanni’s Room — James Baldwin, 1956 · easy
- Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe, 1958 · easy
- Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys, 1966 · medium
Five famous classics to save for later
These are on every list of classics, and they deserve to be. They are just not where I would start. Read one of the books above first, and come back to these when you know you enjoy older fiction.
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A great novel and a famously uneven read: whole chapters are about whales and whaling. Read it once you know you like the nineteenth century.
- War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy, 1869. Start with Anna Karenina. If you love it, this is your next big project.
- Ulysses — James Joyce, 1922. One day in Dublin, and the hardest book on most classic lists. Worth it with a guide, not as your first classic.
- In Search of Lost Time — Marcel Proust, 1913. Seven volumes. Read the first, Swann’s Way, and decide from there.
- Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes, 1605. Funnier than its reputation and more than a thousand pages long. A book for a long holiday.
How this list was chosen
I started from the books on my own shelf, marked with the round Night Owl stamp, and added the classics that turn up on nearly every serious list, from Penguin’s readers’ hundred to the British Library’s. Then I cut anything I would not hand to a friend who said she wanted to start reading classics.
That is why there are 16 women here and not a token few, why the list stops at 1987, and why the hardest famous books are in their own section instead of at the top. Where a book is on my shelf, the note under it is mine and signed; the other notes are there to help you choose.
Questions about classic books
What is a classic book?
A classic is a book that is still read long after the time it was written for, because it still says something true about people. Italo Calvino put it best: a classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
What classic book should I read first?
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier or Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Both are easy to get into and hard to put down. If you would rather start with something short, read The Great Gatsby or The Stranger, which are both under 250 pages.
What are some short classic books?
On this page, 14 classics are under 250 pages, including The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, The Awakening, Passing, Of Mice and Men, Giovanni’s Room and Letters to a Young Poet. Most can be read in a weekend.
What are the easiest classics to read?
Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, Nineteen Eighty-Four, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Bell Jar. All of them are marked easy on this page: modern enough in style that you can just read.
Are classic books worth reading today?
Yes, if you choose the right one to start with. The books that last are the ones about things that have not changed: wanting more than you have, guilt, jealousy, money, loneliness. Start with an easy one, and do not begin with Ulysses or Moby-Dick.
What are the best classic books by women?
16 of the 33 classics on this page are by women. Beyond Austen and the Brontës, read The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Passing by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
What is the hardest classic book to read?
Of the famous ones, Ulysses by James Joyce. On this page, the hardest are Middlemarch, Mrs Dalloway, Lolita, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved. They are hard in different ways, and all worth it once you have a few easier classics behind you.
Can a modern book be a classic?
Yes. A book becomes a classic when it keeps being read and keeps changing how people write and think. Beloved, published in 1987, is the newest book on this page and is already taught and read as a classic.
Footnotes
- Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?”, via Open Culture
- Penguin, “100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers”
- Pan Macmillan, “Classic books to read at least once in your lifetime”
- British Library Shop, Classics collection
- Wikipedia, Madame Bovary (serialisation and trial)
- Wikipedia, The Lottery (publication and reader response)
Years are first publication in book form unless the entry says otherwise. Length and difficulty labels are my own guide, not a measurement; page counts differ by edition. Last checked 17 October 2026.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The signed notes are all mine,
and so is the shelf.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
— Italo Calvino, “Why Read the Classics?”
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
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