Short Books To Get You Thinking

Reading is not a competitive sport - so if you read 2 books a year or 2 books a week, that's okay. We all have different lives and time constraints and we all read at different speeds. 

Having said that, sometimes, I know, you just feel like you want to read a short book. A book that doesn't leave you feeling overwhelmed when you look at the hundreds of pages still to go. A book that isn't going to take you until Christmas 2027 to finish. These short books, usually categorised as under 200 pages,  can also be really good if you're coming off the back of a big, heavy novel and you just want a change pace. Or if you're in a bit of a reading slump and struggling to get into anything. 

But just because a book is short, doesn't mean it is a 'read and forget'. There are some great classics, memoirs and award winners that are all pretty concise but will leave you thinking. 

Here are a few worth trying. 

1. The Thirty Nine Steps - by John Buchan - 119 pages of gripping thriller with no spare words or long descriptive paragraphs. This is a classic of its kind, first published in 1915. A man returns to his London flat to find a stranger murdered. 
2. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - by Muriel Spark - 128 pages of stark prose and wonderful sharp dialogue. Miss Brodie is an unconventional teacher at a school in 1930's Edinburgh. She tells her students about her romances, the importance of cleansing cream for skin and the interior decoration of the home of the author of Winnie The Pooh. 
3. Mrs Dalloway - by Virginia Woolf - 172 pages. The Mrs Dalloway of the title is giving an important party and the novel revolves around her thoughts and memories throughout the day. Woolf's fourth novel and considered a real classic. 
4. Breakfast At Tiffany's - by Truman Capote - 158 pages.  The charming classic story of the friendship between the narrator and his fabulous neighbour, Holly Golightly. It's all very New York feeling. And yes, it was made famous by the movie, but honestly, the book is better. 
5. No One Writes to the Colonel - by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 170 pages. A good starting point if you want to read a little Garcia Marquez, and get a flavour of his writing and the South American life that he paints. A Nobel Prize winner Garcia Marquez is probably best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude.