24 Wonderful Books Under 200 Pages
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- čas přidán 23. 07. 2024
- When work is busy and I can only devote short periods of time to reading I want a book that will make a big impact. Here are 24 suggestions in response to a Vulture article. Click ‘Show More’ for info & links.
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Vulture article by Maris Kreizman
www.vulture.com/article/best-...
The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages
• The 50 Best Contempora...
Books discussed & purchase links:
The Queens of Sarmiento Park by Camila Sosa Villada (2022)
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Slow Days, Fast Company by Eve Babitz (1977)
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Assembly by Natasha Brown (2021)
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The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1974)
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The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2002)
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The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick (2015)
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007)
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Justine by Forsyth Harmon (2021)
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When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (2021)
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The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (2019)
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The Story of My Teeth by Valeria Luiselli (2015)
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Like Life by Lorrie Moore (1990)
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Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009)
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Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill (2014)
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Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith (2012)
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Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit (2014)
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Spectacle by Susan Steinberg (2013)
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We the Animals by Justin Torres (2011)
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Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima (1979)
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How To Get Into the Twin Palms by Karolina Waclawiak (2012)
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Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (2022)
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The Passion by Jeanette Winterson (1996)
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Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson (2016)
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The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink (2014)
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Thanks for sharing your amazing list, Eric. Will read a few one day.
😊📚
A lot of these I had never heard of and are added to my want to read list!
Great video and audio 👏👏👏
I’m going to check with my library on many of these. Thank you for sharing this list! I’m currently working on 30 books in 30 days. ☺️ Thanks, Eric!
That's an ambitious goal!
I read The Hearing Trumpet early on in my reading journey and was definitely not expecting what it was offering. I might give it a re-read in a couple years because I don't think I got as much out of it as I could have. Big recommend!
Terrific video and recommendations! Woodson, Winterson and Levy! More people need to read We the Animals.
It’s so satisfying to complete a rich but short book in a sitting.
Yes!
Short books are my favorite and so rarely featured. Thank you for some great recs!
😊📚
You would love the hearing trumpet!! The perfect sassy old lady story
👍
I loved When We ceased to Understand the World. I read it for the international Booker last year and it was my favourite.
Fascinating list but I have to give a much more encouraging shout for Deborah Levy’s Man who saw Everything - I thought it was brilliant!
Yeah, I know many other people who praised it highly so I know I’ve got the outside opinion on this.
Intimacy by Hanif Kureshi and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan are short works I loved that come to mind
Hearing Trumpet is amazing!
Foster by Claire Keegan is wonderful too.
I've read Reluctant Fundamentalist and it's really great book. I found Exit West very impactful but I do think you would find this one more emotional and less conceptual. It is experimental in the way that we only ever hear one side of a conversation. It begins with a man in Lahore telling an American man directions toward tea and then as they wait for their tea he starts narrating his experience of living in American before and after 911 and how he ended up back in Pakistan. It feels very intriguing as the title is almost a question and then you have this conversation where you have Changez responding but you do not hear what the American is saying.
Another Brooklyn is good, it's not my favourite of her work. I really recommend Brown Girl Dreaming, it's memoir in verse and it is really good!
That is really interesting and sounds very impactful, thank you. And thanks for the recommendation of Brown Girl Dreaming.
What a great list! All of these are new to me and so many are appealing. I really want to read Jeanette Winterson and Deborah Levy. 😊💙
Hope you enjoy them! 📚
Have not read any of those books but have Territory of Light out from the library right now as well as Nell Zink’s new one Avalon. Want to read several others esp the Babitz. Great video! 😊
Thanks! 📚
Interesting list, I love a short book that packs a punch. My favourite novella not on the list would be West by Carys Davis. Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is also short and brilliant.
Sarah Moss has some brilliant short fiction out too.
From the list I've only read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut and The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. All great.
I would like to recommend The Shift by Theresa Brown...
And I added so many books from your list... thanks Eric 😊
Thank you so much for sharing these - so many great sounding books. I also liked Hot Milk more than The Man Who Saw Everything! And I also used to confuse Nell Zink and Kelly Link LOL - until I read Kelly Link's short stories and started reading more from her independent press, Small Beer Press. Thanks again for going through the list!
Thanks! 📚 I'm sure once I start reading Zink and Link they'll be very distinct in my mind. 😅
I also loved Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson and pretty much any novel by Patrick Modiano (like the upcoming translation of his newest "Scene of a Crime").
Great and I've always meant to read Modiano.
Thank You!🌠
😊📚
I look forward to trying some of these books. I love rereading The Hearing Trumpet every year. A very short book I like to reread is Two Old Women by Velma Wallis.
Thanks for the recommendation of Wallis' book.
Thank you! I look forward to reading some of these.!
A short book I loved is called
The Samurai’s Garden- by Gail Tsukiyama. Also Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner
Thanks for the recommendations! 📚
So many good books on this list. I loved the Labatut. Some others worth a mention since others are sharing here: The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, and (a longtime favorite of mine) The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares.
I love The Mezzanine. I read it aloud to my partner while we were on a road trip and it really brought out the humour of the book. And those two others are ones I've meant to get to. Thank you!
I really enjoyed “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” I would also recommend Julian Barnes’new novel “Elizabeth Finch”(179 pages).📚
I'd heard mixed things about Elizabeth Finch but Barnes is great so I should read it, thanks.
The only one I’ve read on the list is
The Man Who Saw Everything
More recommendations for you
Foster by Claire Keegan (has been made into an Irish Language film called The Quiet Girl and tipped for Oscar nomination)
The Secret Life of Church Ladies
Interpreter of Maladies
The Spare Room
The Weekend
The Ballad of Lucy Gault by William Trevor ☘️👋🍀📖📚☕️📕
Claire Keegan's Foster is brilliant, I couldn't get her new one last month, so read that one instead, so good. Agree that The Spare Room by Helen Garner and The Weekend by Charlotte Wood are also exceptional. I still have to read the others on your list. I also read The Luminous Solution by Charlotte Wood in August, it's her non-fiction collection of essays on the writing process, I found it very interesting.
Yes, I need to read more by Keegan and I think I read that novel by Trevor a long time ago and enjoyed it.
I’ve read the Ferrante - and I think Days is her finest work to date out of everything available in English, the Labatut, and the Tsushima. I have a couple of others, like the Moore, which I should have gotten to long before now. Some other recommendations:
Jose Eduardo Agualusa, tr. by Daniel Hann - The Book Of Chameleons
Nicholson Baker - The Mezzanine
Nadine Gordimer - July’s People
Denis Johnson - Jesus’ Son (stories)
Gayl Jones - Corregidora (!!!)
Miranda July - No Belongs Here More Than You (stories)
Mieko Kawakami, tr. by Sam Bett and David Boyd - Heaven
Cees Nooteboom, tr. by Susan Massotty - Lost Paradise
Michael Ondaatje - In The Skin Of A Lion
James Salter - Last Night (stories)
So many others, really, but those were the first to come into my mind (including the Ferrante, of course….)
Thanks for another great video!!
I so want to get my hands on that first book!
I think the only short book I read recently is Malinche by Laura Esquivel. I would love to know what you think of that book, since it is extraordinairy (magic realism). I don´t know what the translation in english is like. I read it in Portuguese.
Thank you for the reviews and recommandations
I love a good list. 😀 I've read _The Days of Abandonment._ I liked it, but I didn't think it was great. I just finished _My Brilliant Friend_ by Ferrante, the first book in her Neapolitan series. It promises to be good. The first book sets up the rest pretty well. I really liked _We the Animals,_ but I wanted more from it. I wanted it to be longer.
That’s interesting AJ, as I think Days is her best work to date, something about the compression, and how it crescendos….I feel an immaculate sense of control reading Days, whereas with the Quartet, it is so maximalist and it reads sometimes as an exercise in fleshing out ideas and characters with abandon (sometimes to the detriment of the work itself). It reads like a love letter to Italy in the 60’s and 70’s, and as I wasn’t there during that time, some of the detail is lost literally in translation.
People I’ve spoken with who’ve read her oeuvre do tend to prefer either the slender novels or the Quartet, typically by a wide margin. I hope you enjoy the rest of the quartet - I think the 4th volume is the best of the rest after Brilliant - so stick with it! I appreciate your comment
@@drewnorth5545 I found _My Brilliant Friend_ to be good, but again not great. It's probably the writing style. I've read so many far better books than these. We all have different tastes.
Ah okay, interesting. 📚
I’d have to recommend Becky Chambers A Psalm for the Wild-built and A prayer for the Crown-Shy! Both around 155 pages.
Interesting! Thanks!
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, The Blizzard by Vladimir Sorokin and The Life Before Us by Emile Ajar (Romain Gary) are my recommendations. Very special and very different from each other.
Thanks for the recommendations! 📚
Wow, by coincidence I am reading THE WALLCREEPER now! I read Zink's NICTIONE a few years ago and did not keep it, mostly because the ending devolved into a mess. We'll see what happens here, but I'm leaning toward keeping it. It's true my tastes run a little more toward the sedate, and so I haven't been exposed to the edgiest stuff out there, but Zink's ideas and mode of expression feel totally original to me, so much so that you won't mind that the characters are not especially likeable. The last time you covered short novels on your channel, Sarah Moss's GHOST WALL came up a lot, so I read it. One case where I wished a book were a bit LONGER, although the ending had an air of inevitability that had been well-paced.
That's interesting, thank you. And I'm so glad you read Ghost Wall! She's an excellent writer.
Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector is a short book that is definitely worth the time.
Going to buy Assembly today! Also, my bookclub is reading The Netanyahus…
Hope you enjoy and yes, I've been meaning to get to that.
Interesting that they chose Another Brooklyn over Red at the Bone from Jacqueline Woodson. I’ve been calling Red at the Bone a masterpiece since I read it, but I haven’t gotten to Another Brooklyn yet. Maybe this weekend…
I’ve also got Red at the Bone on my shelf so I really ought to read both.
I loved Stella by Takis Wurger. At first it seems like a weird fictional romance with a notorious historical figure, but it’s really an indictment of young people who think it would be interesting and romantic to live through terrible historic events. It’s also a beautiful exploration of that moment at the end of a love when you’re still fooling yourself even though you know it’s doomed.
That sounds great. Thank you for the recommendation!
as an addition I loved goodbye tsugumi by banana yoshimoto
So many of my friends love her writing I really need to try one of her books.
My favourite short novel is Lullaby by Leila Slimani. I think you would enjoy it if you haven't read it already.
Yes, I thought Lullaby was excellent. I posted about it here lonesomereader.com/blog/2018/1/12/lullaby-by-leila-slimani-translated-by-sam-taylor and I got to have lunch with the author when it was published in the UK.
Cynan Jones is the master of the novella! Also totally not biased as he is 🏴
Yes! As an American I can give the unbiased opinion that this is true. 😄
@@EricKarlAnderson Unity & Harmony have been achieved
Orwell`s Roses by Solnit is very good!
I've been meaning to read this for ages!