We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(6) Tree Line
This novel was written for a wide audience in the nineteenth century, so the language – while old-fashioned – is pretty straightforward. If we were going on words alone, we'd probably give this one about a 5. But hoo boy is it long. This is a long novel, with about a hundred (seriously) named characters. And out of those hundred characters, at least twenty of them have major, multi-chapter plot arcs. We love David Copperfield. We think it's funny and heart-wrenching and delightful. But you need a roadmap to follow all the twists and turns of the plot. David Copperfield is like a modern-day soap opera in book form. So, we're bumping up the difficulty rating to acknowledge that it's not always easy to remember who's doing what from chapter to chapter.