Western Canon reading list
Great Novels
Ten capacious novels that demonstrate what the form can contain.
How to use this reading path
The sequence moves from the self-conscious birth of the modern novel through social realism, psychological extremity, and twentieth-century reinvention.
- Books
- 10
- Estimated hours
- 520
- Suggested pace
- 14 months
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
The reading order
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez