The Classics, Level 1: The Gateway

Everyone means to read 'the classics' and stalls on page ten of something forbidding. Start here instead: six short, plot-forward, deservedly beloved novels that happen to also be canonical. Finish this level and you'll already have read more of the canon than most people manage in a lifetime, Level 2 waits when you're hungry for more.

1. 1
   The Call of the Wild

   Jack London · 1903

   Lvl 2172pp

   Under two hundred pages, one sled dog, zero wasted sentences: the friendliest possible proof that a classic can also be a page-turner.

   ＋Save
2. 2
   Animal Farm

   George Orwell · 1945

   Lvl 2112pp

   A barnyard fable you can finish in an evening and still be thinking about a week later: satire so clear it needs no footnotes.

   ＋Save
3. 3
   Treasure Island

   Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883

   Lvl 3230pp

   Pirates, a map, a one-legged cook you can't quite trust: the adventure novel's whole DNA, still this much fun two centuries later.

   ＋Save
4. 4
   Candide

   Voltaire · 1759

   Lvl 3120pp

   Voltaire's hero gets clobbered by every disaster the eighteenth century can invent and keeps optimistically bouncing back: comedy as philosophy, over almost before it starts.

   ＋Save
5. 5
   Pride and Prejudice

   Jane Austen · 1813

   Lvl 3432pp

   Wit, courtship, and a hero who has to unlearn his own pride before he deserves the girl: Austen's plainest, funniest, most purely enjoyable novel.

   ＋Save
6. 6
   To Kill a Mockingbird

   Harper Lee · 1960

   Lvl 3336pp

   The capstone: a child narrator makes a hard American history lesson go down easy, without softening a single one of its punches.

   ＋Save