Looking for a Challenge?


If you want to earn some bragging rights pick up one of these challenging titles. From content to form all the books on this list have unique hurdles for readers to overcome.


The Castle

Franz Kafka

Left unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.'s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman's new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.

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The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

Unfinished at the time of his death, The Canterbury Tales is widely regarded as Chaucer's masterpiece and one of the greatest and most influential works in English literature. A group of pilgrims recount chivalric romances, bawdy tales, fables, legends, and more. Noble, coarse, jolly, and pious, their stories are translated into modern English verse.

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Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Marlowe sails down the Congo in search of Kurtz, a company agent who has, according to rumors, become insane in the jungle isolation

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To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

An English family's complex lives are followed and picked up again after a 10 year hiatus in order to explore the effects of time.

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Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained

John Milton

Presents the complete texts of the seventeenth-century English poet's two great epic poems about creation, fall, and redemption of humankind and the moral and spiritual dilemmas of God's judgment.

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Ulysses

James Joyce

Ulysses, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, 16 June 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each episode has its own literary style, and the epic journey of Odysseus is only one of many correspondencies that add layers of meaning to the text.Ulysses has been the subject of controversy since copies of the first English edition were burned by the New York Post Office Authorities. Today critical interest centres on the authority of the text, and this edition, complete with an invaluable Introduction, notes, and appendices, republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text.

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War and Peace

graf Leo Tolstoy

Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families.

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The Year of Magical Thinking

Joan Didion

From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life – in good times and bad – that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.

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