Start here
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect and his first worry is that he has missed his train. The family's reaction is the actual subject, and the whole thing takes about ninety minutes to read.
Collection · Ninth grade
The 9th grade reading list, free to download
- 15
- books to download
- 6
- we cannot serve yet
- 800 BC–1925
- 2725 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
Freshman English tends to draw from the same short shelf: one Shakespeare play, one Greek epic, one Dickens, one American adventure novel, and something short enough to finish over a weekend.
All fifteen here are in the public domain in the United States, so they download in PDF or EPUB with no account and no wait. Every card shows its page count and an estimated reading time, which is the number that matters when the essay is due Monday.
The last section is the one nobody else gives you straight: six books that turn up on ninth-grade lists year after year, are **not** free, will not be for decades, and have no legal free download for a reader in the United States.
How this list was built
This page does not claim to know which books American schools assign most often. Nobody publishes a reliable national list — the Common Core exemplars are not usable as one and several states have repealed the standards outright — so any site telling you these are «the most commonly assigned» is guessing.
What can be stated and checked is everything else: whether a book is in the public domain in the United States, how many pages this edition runs to, roughly how long it takes to read, and for the ones still in copyright, the year they stop being. Those are the four things a student actually needs.
Sophomore, junior and senior year draw on a longer and harder list. That one lives on its own page.
If it is due Monday
Four books under a hundred pages
Every one of these can be finished in an evening. If you have left it late, start at the top: The Metamorphosis is forty-nine pages and most of the questions people ask about it are answered in the first one.
72 pages
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Structurally a detective story: a lawyer works towards a fact the reader has known since before opening the book. Set most often for essays on duality, which is what it is built to be about.
A Christmas Carol
Its full title calls it a ghost story of Christmas, and it is one: four hauntings in a single night, told in five short staves. Dickens at his most compact, which is not how he usually comes.
The Call of the Wild
A domestic dog is stolen and taken to the Klondike, and the book is about what the cold takes out of him. Told largely from the dog's point of view without ever making him talk.
The play and the two epics
The oldest things on the list and the ones that reward reading a summary first. Knowing the plot in advance spoils none of them: Romeo and Juliet gives away both deaths in its opening sonnet, and neither poem was written to surprise anybody.
In cinemas now
The Odyssey
Ten years to get home, and Odysseus spends the whole second half of the poem lying about who he is to people who would help him if he told the truth. Christopher Nolan's film opened in July 2026.
The Iliad
Not the whole Trojan War — only its last weeks, opening with an argument over a captive and ending before the city falls. If you are expecting the wooden horse, it is not in here.
Romeo and Juliet
The Prologue tells you both of them die, in the first fourteen lines, before you have met either. Everything after that is watching the machinery close, which is the point of the essay question.
The American four
Four novels that between them cover the Mississippi, the Civil War at the front and at home, and the Jazz Age. This is the part of freshman English that is really a history class.
131 pages
The Red Badge of Courage
A boy who has never seen a battle spends the book deciding whether he is a coward. Crane had never seen one either when he wrote it, and reviewers took him for a veteran anyway.
140 pages
The Great Gatsby
Gatsby built a fortune and a persona to win back a woman he knew for a month in 1917. Nick tells you it is a love story while the book keeps showing you it is about money.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Episodes rather than a plot: the fence, the graveyard, the island, the cave. Read it before Huckleberry Finn, which is a different and much harder book and usually comes a year or two later.
Little Women
Four sisters and very little money while their father is away at the war. Alcott's publisher asked her for a book for girls, she did not want to write one, and this is what came out.
The British four
Sorted shortest first, because with these the page count is the assignment.
Treasure Island
Most of the pirate furniture in English that is not from a film comes from here: the map with the cross, the black spot, the one-legged man with the parrot.
Begun at eighteen
Frankenstein
The monster is articulate, reads Milton and argues its case for six chapters. Shelley started it at eighteen on a wet holiday, and built it as three narrators nested inside each other.
Pride and Prejudice
Five sisters, no sons, and an estate that will pass to a cousin. The romance works because Austen puts the economics of it on the first page and never lets you forget them.
505 pages
Great Expectations
A boy is given money by someone he cannot identify and spends the book being wrong about who. Dickens wrote two endings; the bleak one came first and he changed it on a friend's advice.
The six that are not free
And the year five of them will be
These turn up on ninth-grade lists year after year, and none of them is legally available as a free download in the United States. If a site offers you one, it is not a legal copy. A library card is free and will get you all six today. The dates are when United States copyright expires, worked out from the year of publication rather than typed in by hand.
Unlocks January 2033
Of Mice and Men
Two ranch hands and a plan for a small farm. It has been near the top of the American Library Association's challenged-books lists for decades and on reading lists for just as long, which is the whole story of this page.
Unlocks January 2041
Animal Farm
Short enough to read in one sitting, which is part of why it gets set so early. Orwell called it a fairy story on the title page.
Unlocks January 2049
Fahrenheit 451
A novel about burning books, which is the joke every teacher makes and every student then has to go and buy.
Unlocks January 2050
Lord of the Flies
Golding wrote it as an answer to a Victorian adventure story in which shipwrecked boys behave impeccably.
Unlocks January 2056
To Kill a Mockingbird
A fixture of American reading lists for sixty years, and the one people most often expect to find here. It will not be free until the 2050s.
Not in our library
The Giver
Published in 1993, so its American copyright runs for the author's lifetime plus seventy years. This is the one with no date anyone can give you.