SO MANY BOOKS, so little time. To help you prioritize, we’ve condensed a few tree-killing tomes and calculated their reading level and readability scores according to the widely used Flesch-Kincaid algorithm (0=hard, 100=easy).
Rising Up and Rising Down
GRADE LEVEL: 12th
READING EASE: 56
3,352 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: Why can’t we all just get along?
GRADE LEVEL: 9th
READING EASE: 65
1,079 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: Tennis, footnotes, and pot are gateway drugs
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
GRADE LEVEL: 9th
READING EASE: 68
1,296 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: Russian names and winters are brutally long
by James Joyce
GRADE LEVEL: 6th
READING EASE: 81
816 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: Rambling Dubliner keeps literature profs employed forever
2666
by Roberto Bolaño
GRADE LEVEL: 15th grade
READING EASE: 42
912 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: Five dense postmodern books rolled into one
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
GRADE LEVEL: 9th
READING EASE: 70
1,168 PAGES IN 7 WORDS: To each according to his ridiculous megalomania
