I'm looking for something short yet impactful, something fast paced but dense, something that doesn't waste any words. A book where every sentence feels meaningful and every dialogue carries weight. A book that you finish in one night, yet stays with you for a long time and makes you wish it was longer.
Any genre is fine.
by IdaSukiShwan
30 Comments
The Singing Hills cycle by Nghi Vo may fit this. They’re all under 200 pages but really engaging.
Animal farm by George Orwell
*The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements* by Eric Hoffer.
Sula by Toni Morrison
A short stay in hell by Steven L Peck
So the Wind Won’t Blow it all Away, A Short Stay in Hell, Of Cattle and Men, Train Dreams.
Foster and Small These Like These by Claire Keegan
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
**Radical Attention** by Julia Bell
71 pages about where our attention has gone and why.
It writes as it demonstrates, knowing every word is a fight to keep us captivated.
True Grit is right around 200 pages (depending on page size). I didn’t walk away from it feeling like I learned a lesson about life, but I finished it in a day or two and still think about it. The dialogue is fantastic and there were even some parts that I highlighted because I thought they were especially poignant or well written. I rarely do that with fiction. I think it’s one of the quintessential “American” books (second to Lonesome Dove, of course) and I mean that in a good way.
The Day The World Came To Town.
But a smidge over.
The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton
I who have never known men by Jacqueline Harpman
To be taught, if fortunate by Becky Chambers
or if you’re willing to go a bit over This is how you lose the time war by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
Time Shifters by Shanna Lauffey
Comfort me with apples by Catherynne m. Valente
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”-Flannery O’Connor
The Paper Menagerie
Short story by Ken Liu
Its only a few pages but it moved me in a way that longer works never have.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
Of Mice and Men
The War of Art by Steven Pressfield
Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell
What Would the Rockefeller’s Do? by Garrett B Gunderson
*Of Mice and Men*, by John Steinbeck
*Cannery Row*, also by John Steinbeck
The sequel to Cannery Row, *Sweet Thursday*, is close at 249 pages
*Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982* by Cho Nam-joo This is a Korean book about a woman having a nervous breakdown after decades of dealing with the misogyny of SK life from the favoring of her brother to getting the worst clients at her job and on and on. I got it from my local library on Libby. I read it with a strong realization that all of it could happen in any country.
Pedro Paramo. Not very fast paced but gripping
Heritage by Miguel Bonnefoy.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman and My Happy Life by Lydia Millet
A Month in the Country
My Death
Operation Heartbreak
Slaughterhouse 5
Heard of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
You want call of the wild. This book damn near made me cry.
Chess by Stefan Zweig
Shocked that Murderbot hasn’t come up yet! I think the only books over 200 pages are the most recent release System Collapse (256 hardcover pages according to Amazon), and book 5, Network Effect, which is the only one billed as a full length novel instead of a novella.