For that voracious reader on your Holiday Gift List, you might consider Kenneth C. Davis’s Great Short Books! I found Kenneth C. Davis an engaging guide to these great short novels. You might remember one of Davis’s other books: Don’t Know Much About History. The same clear writing and perceptive analysis from Don’t Know Much About History shows up in Great Short Books.
How many of these great short books have you read? Do you see some titles of books you’d like to read? GRADE: A
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Notes of a common reader — xv
Agostino / Alberto Moravia — 1
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story / George Orwell — 7
Another Brooklyn / Jacqueline Woodson — 13
The Awakening / Kate Chopin — 19
Ballad of the Sad Café / Carson McCullers — 25
Big Boy Leaves Home / Richard Wright — 31
Bonjour Tristesse / Françoise Sagan — 39
Candide, or Optimism / Voltaire — 45
Charlotte’s Web / E. B. White — 53
A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess — 57
The Country Girls / Edna O’Brien — 65
Death in Venice / Thomas Mann — 71
Dept. of Speculation / Jenny Offill — 77
The Dry Heart / Natalia Ginzburg — 83
Ethan Frome / Edith Wharton — 89
Evil Under the Sun / Agatha Christie — 95
The Fifth Child / Doris Lessing — 101
The Ghost Writer / Philip Roth — 107
The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald — 113
The Hour of the Star / Clarice Lispector — 119
The House on Mango Street / Sandra Cisneros — 125
If Beale Street Could Talk / James Baldwin — 131
If This Is a Man [Survival in Auschwitz] / Primo Levi — 137
July’s People / Nadine Gordimer — 143
The Lathe of Heaven / Ursula K. Le Guin — 149
Lord of the Flies / William Golding — 155
The Lost Daughter / Elena Ferrante — 161
The Lover / Marguerite Duras — 167
Lucy / Jamaica Kincaid — 173
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History / Art Spiegelman — 179
Middle Passage / Charles Johnson — 185
Mrs. Dalloway / Virginia Woolf — 191
The Hours / Michael Cunningham — 197
The Nickel Boys / Colson Whitehead — 203
No One Writes to the Colonel / Gabriel García Márquez — 209
The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway — 215
On Chesil Beach / Ian McEwan — 223
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — 229
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit / Jeanette Winterson — 235
Pale Horse, Pale Rider / Katherine Anne Porter — 241
A Pale View of Hills / Kazuo Ishiguro — 247
Passing / Nella Larsen — 253
The Perfect Nanny / Leïla Slimani — 261
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man / James Joyce — 267
The Postman Always Rings Twice / James M. Cain — 273
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / Muriel Spark — 279
The Red Badge of Courage / Stephen Crane — 285
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption / Stephen King — 291
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea / Yukio Mishima — 297
The Stranger / Albert Camus — 303
Sula / Toni Morrison — 309
Surfacing / Margaret Atwood — 315
Their Eyes Were Watching God / Zora Neale Hurston — 321
Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe — 327
Tokyo Ueno Station / Yu Miri — 333
Waiting for the Barbarians / J. M. Coetzee — 339
We Have Always Lived in the Castle / Shirley Jackson — 343
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys — 349
Afterword: What’s not here — 355
My favorite fifteen great short books — 361
Index of entries by date of publication — 363
Index of entries by author’s last name — 365
Nobel Prize in Literature Laureates in this book — 367
More Great Short Books — 369
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS — 371
Notes About the Books — 373
I usually don’t read anything from the books you post but I read eight of these! They didn’t seem that short to me, though!
Bob, compared to Dickens and Anthony Trollope door-stoppers, these short novels look like short stories! Congratulations on reading eight of the books!
I’ve read seven of them, and tried — really tried — to push my way through DALLOWAY.
Dan, DALLOWAY has been on my Read Real Soon list..for years.
I find Virginia Woolf quite a slog to get through.
Steve, her writing is very dense. She had a very sad ending herself.
I’ve read about half (although, I must say, when I was reading it, DEATH IN VENICE did not feel like a SHORT book), my favorites being Christie’s EVIL UNDER THE SUN and Kate Chopin’s THE AWAKENING—the latter for sentimental reasons because it was the book I was reading when a callow youth named John Pfeifer came into my cubicle at the place where we both worked and exclaimed, “Why are you reading that?” To which I, quite sassy, replied, “Because I want to.” Turned out, he had read it for a college class, so it became the first thing we ever discussed beyond social niceties. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Deb, I’m a fan of EVIL UNDER THE SUN, too. It does not surprise me that you and John first interacted…about a book!
“Short” books? CLOCKWORK ORANGE? GATSBY? PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST? Well, maybe in comparison with WAR AND PEACE or COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO. Otherwise, ???
Fred, I’m a little disappointed that more Science Fiction novels weren’t included: Fahrenheit 451, The Last Castle, Flowers for Algernon, Nightfall, etc.
GATSBY is barely a novella.
How many have you read, George? I’ve read 8 in my quick skim, and have meant to get to others.
Todd, I’ve read 30 of the GREAT SHORT BOOKS. However, there’s about a dozen titles listed that I have ZERO interest in reading.
My book group needs this list. We are always on the watch for short books to read.
Patti, there are a lot of great short books discussed in this volume.
22 for sure, perhaps one or two more.
I recommend ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT, and definitely look for the television adaptation (1990) with Charlotte Coleman and Geraldine McEwan as her awful mother.
I wouldn’t call THINGS FALL APART short either. I read it when Jackie had to read it for a course. I read (and hated) DEATH IN VENICE for an advanced English course in high school. Also read Joyce for that class – DUBLINERS and PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST. And yes, there are others I’ve “meant” to read. Maybe someday.
Jeff, I’m with you on THINGS FALL APART and DEATH IN VENICE. I had similar experiences with those two works.
I’ve read about a dozen, the classics and the SF.
There’s just not enough time for all those books.
Wolf, exactly! There isn’t enough time to read all these works. But Kenneth C. Davis makes it easy to pick and choose the books you’d want to read.
Read 15 of these. Liked most of them. Mrs. Dalloway being an exception. I hated it.
Steve, several of the books listed in GREAT SHORT BOOKS can be polarizing to some readers.
Update: The Seahawks won in heart-stopping fashion! So much for my prediction, I’m happy to say!
Bob, everybody knows a Seahawk is stronger than an Eagle! Congratulations on a great win!