More interesting points and authors. I have taught a ton of both Orwell and Shakespeare over a quarter century in the classroom-love 'em both. Shakespeare invented dozens of words, and so many of our common sayings come from his plays; Poor Richard's Almanac (Ben Franklin), Oscar Wilde, and the "Wisdom literature" from the Old Testament ("Ecclesiastes" and "Proverbs") account for much of the rest.
As for books that could be trimmed some, Invisible Man gets pretty long and tedious in the middle stretch where the narrator is in "the Brotherhood." Even my beloved Look Homeward Angel (about my hometown of Asheville) is pretty long, though I just get lost in Wolfe's extravagant language-nobody ever wrote like him! And even though I find the whaling lore fascinating, I have been "reading" the notorious Moby Dick for many years now-I'm about halfway through it lol! Another one I mentioned above, A Tale of Two Cities, clocks in at almost 400 pages of small print in very archaic Victorian-era English. Many of my students struggle with it (or, I suspect, don't even bother), so I'm thinking of subbing in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is quite a bit shorter and, my colleagues in other schools report, more engaging for students.
One notoriously long contemporary work that is even as we speak giving me the stink-eye from my bookshelf is Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The 1500-pages of it are the main thing keeping me from starting it, tbh.
