Classics, minus the confusion.
Start here
The ten classics readers open most.
Find a book at the right level
Every Plain English rewrite reads at about grade 8. Pick how hard you want the original to be.
Easy originals
3 books → Grades 6–8Old words, simple prose
32 books → Grades 9–10Harder originals
19 books → Grades 11–12+Dense prose
11 books →Find your next classic
Plain English versions are written for about a grade 8 reader. The reading level on each book is the original’s — the published ATOS level schools use — so you can see how big a step Plain English is. How we grade books
How we grade books
Plain English: grade 8
Every rewrite aims at a grade 8 reader (about ages 13–14): sentences of 15–20 words, everyday words for old ones like thou, ere or countenance, and nothing left out. 69 of 90 books have one so far; the rest are marked Original only.
The original’s level
The ATOS book level of the original text, from Renaissance, the measure behind Accelerated Reader in US schools: 7.4 means a typical 7th grader, four months into the year. It’s what you face reading the original, or when a class assigns it. AR BookFinder
Age fit
How hard a book is to read isn’t how mature it is. AR Interest Levels say who a book’s themes suit, and Plain English doesn’t change them: Dracula is for ages 14+.
Assigned in school
Books named as grade-level text exemplars in the Common Core State Standards, the texts many US classes are built around. Appendix B
Why not score Plain English with a formula like Flesch–Kincaid? We tried. It only counts sentence and syllable lengths, so it can’t see old words like thou: it barely tells a rewrite from its original, and rates Romeo and Juliet at grade 3. So we give the grade Plain English is written for, and the original’s published level.
11 books
A Christmas Carol in Prose
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth
A Little Princess
A Room with a View
A Study in Scarlet
A Tale of Two Cities
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
All Quiet on the Western Front
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Anna Karenina
Anne of Green Gables
Around the World in Eighty Days
Beyond Good and Evil
Bleak House
Carmilla
Cranford
Crime and Punishment
Don Quixote
Dracula
Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
Frankenstein
From the Earth to the Moon
Great Expectations
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
Jane Eyre
Life on the Mississippi
Little Women
Louise De La Vallière
Metamorphosis
Middlemarch
Moby Dick; Or, The Whale
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Oliver Twist
Paradise Lost
Peter Pan
Pride and Prejudice
Principles of Political Economy
Romeo and Juliet
Round the Moon
Sense and Sensibility
Ten Years Later
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Blue Castle
The Brothers Karamazov
The Call of the Wild
The Confessions of St. Augustine
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Enchanted April
The Eternal Moment, and Other Stories
The Great Gatsby
The Happy Prince, and Other Tales
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The House of the Seven Gables
The Iliad
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Invisible Man
The Jungle Book
The King in Yellow
The Man in the Iron Mask
The Man Who Was Thursday
The Mysteries of Udolpho
The Odyssey
The Origin of Species
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Scarlet Letter
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Three Musketeers
The Time Machine
The Turn of the Screw
The Vicomte De Bragelonne
The War of the Worlds
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Through the Looking-Glass
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Treasure Island
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Twenty Years After
Ulysses
Uncle Tom's Cabin
War and Peace
White Fang
Winnie-the-Pooh
