I read almost exclusively fantasy and sci fi. Though I enjoy it, I want to dip my toe into some other genres. Any genre really. And perhaps standalone books in the 300 page range, as I would like something a litte shorter. Thank you!
Some books I like:
Project Hail Mary, Dark Matter, Red Rising, Wheel of Time, Game of Thrones
by ytanki
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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Some of the shorter Stephen King books maybe, if you’re up for horror. I’ve read The Shining, The Mist, Misery, Carrie, Gerald’s Game and Shawshank Redemption. (And It, but that’s not exactly short) I mostly liked them, but his endings usually suck, which is known.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
I grew up reading a ton of sci-fi and fantasy especially as a teen and young adult. Short books in other genres that really captivated me at the time were:
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest* by Ken Kesey — it’s less than 300 pages and it’s set in a mental hospital filled with quirky characters. The movie adaptation starring Jack Nicholson won an Academy Award. I was in high school when I read this and I read it in a single day because it was so entertaining.
*A Wild Sheep Chase* by Haruki Murakami — a very odd and surreal story of a man and woman on a quest to find a strange sheep with a star on its back. It falls in the magical realism genre but it more like a bizarre detective story. I loved it because it was unlike anything I had read before and it was my first introduction to Murakami. Around 350 pages.
*Slaughterhouse Five* / *Breakfast of Champions* by Kurt Vonnegut — Vonnegut’s novels usually tend to be short, featuring easy-to-read prose and often have humor. I liked *Slaughterhouse Five* because of a time travel twist but I wouldn’t really say it’s sci-fi, and the occasional pictures in *Breakfast of Champions* made me laugh.
*The Call of the Wild* / *White Fang* by Jack London — it’s about animals but I loved the arctic setting and it made me cry at times.
For nonfiction:
*The Hot Zone* by Richard Preston — describes how a deadly virus could easily spread around the world and destroy humanity. It’s nonfiction but reads like a horror novel / suspense thriller. It’s around 360 pages and it’s a real page-turner.
*Into Thin Air* / *Into the Wild* by Jon Krakauer — both are 300 pages are less. The first book describes the author’s first hand account about the deadly Mt. Everest climb that took the lives of many people. The author was taking notes during the climb and the dangerous descent, and the lack of oxygen to the brain even made him write gibberish at one point, showing just how bad things were becoming for the climbers. The second book talks about the mystery surrounding a young intelligent man who just left his life and his body was later discovered in a bus in the Alaskan wilderness.
I also read a lot of horror:
*I Am Legend* by Richard Matheson — about the last man on earth after a zombie apocalypse. Around 160 pages.
*Carrie* by Stephen King — King tends to write massive novels but his earlier works were shorter. This is his debut horror novel at around 330 pages. I still enjoyed it even though it’s not his most famous work.
*Different Seasons* by Stephen King — contains four novellas (short novels), all of which are good. It’s not necessarily horror but more slice-of-life stories but with a King twist. Three of the stories were made into movies: Stand By Me, The Apt Pupil, and Shawshank Redemption.