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)
(3) Base Camp
Other than the mysterious narrator, an unidentified "we," the novel's pretty straightforward. You know what it's going to be about starting with the first sentence, and it stays obsessively focused on the topic: the Lisbon sisters' suicides. Eugenides uses some nice, big words once in a while, but nothing that you haven't seen when studying for the SAT. The novel skips back and forth in time, but it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story.