Book Shelf: Books to Read in a Day, Pt 1

Eight little reads that make a big impact.

A quick book’s a good book: a tasty snack to crack a reading rut, act as a palette cleanser between big tomes, or gobble up in one sitting. It’s always a feat to create a story with characters readers care about. But to do that within a couple of hundred pages? A hundred? That’s magic.

Here are eight tightly-woven, expertly-edited, not-a-word-wasted books to spend the day with. Next week, I’ll be back with Part 2!

Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam

232 pages

I loved this original, compelling story, which earned a lot of hype and chatter a couple of years ago. A family escapes New York for a long weekend in a summery, oversized rental. But it’s cut short when the homeowners show up unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. The TV and internet is down, the owners are panicked, and something has happened in the city. This is so much more than an apocalyptic read; it’s remarkably well written and an unexpected favourite from the past few years.

It’s the longest of the short reads I’m recommending, but you’ll eat it up.

“Her body still contained the secondhand warmth of the sun. The pool water had barely been a respite, the tepidity of bathwater. Amanda’s limbs felt thick and superb. She wanted to lie down and roll away into sleep … What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.”

Once you’ve read it, listen to Alam’s episode of In Writing with Hattie Crisell; it’s excellent:

This is Pleasure, Mary Gaitskill

83 pages

Gaitskill explores Me Too allegations against a male publisher, switching between his perspective and that of a female friend coming to terms with his behaviour. It’s sharp, well-written, and especially incredible given its short word count.

Heating & Cooling, Beth Ann Fennelly

111 pages

This is special. A collection of 52 micro-memoirs so different and interesting I had to keep reminding myself they were real stories. They read like sparkling, well-polished fiction. Gulp it quickly, or dip in and out.

“After three days, she returned home. The plane bounced twice as it landed. She gathered her belongings from the overhead bin. To prepare to meet the faces she would meet, she stepped into her suit of grief. She pulled it up, over her legs, her hips. She threaded her arms into the sleeves of grief. She huffed it over her back. She snugged it around her shoulders. She buttoned herself tight. Its weight was dear. Dear, dear, dear. She would wear it forever now.”

Graceful Burdens, Roxane Gay

21 pages

A short, Handmaid’s Tale-esque story about women who aren’t allowed to have children (‘acceptable’ women receive a licence to procreate) and the ‘baby library’ they can visit to loan a child for two weeks instead. Very quick and very good.

Intimations, Zadie Smith

80 pages

This short collection of essays was written and published in the thick of the pandemic, when questions like ‘How has lockdown impacted our sense of what makes a good life?’ were most sharp. Smith is at her best here:

“The single human, in the city apartment, thinks: I have never known such loneliness. The married human, in the country place with partner and children, dreams of isolation within isolation. All the artists with children – who treasured isolation as the most precious thing they owned – find out what it is to live without privacy and without time. The writer learns how not to write. The actor not to act. The painter how never to see her studio and so on. The artists without children are delighted by all the free time, for a time, until time itself begins to take on an accusatory look, a judgemental cast, because the fact is it is hard to fill all this time sufficiently, given the sufferings of others. And besides, now there is no clocking off ever, and no drowning of artistic anxiety in a party or conversation or frantic exercise. Married men are confronted with the infinite reality of their wives, who cannot now be exchanged, even mentally, for a strange girl walking down the street. Her face, her face, her face. Your face, your face, your face. The only relief is two faces facing forward, towards the screen.”

Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

196 pages

Red at the Bone opens at a coming-of-age ceremony for Melody, a 16-year-old Black girl. Then, it spins out into many other stories, each chapter a vignette from a family member on their own histories. The chapters from her mother Iris and father Aubrey were my favourites: Iris flees to go to college when Melody is tiny, wanting much more out of her life than a baby and a spouse. In contrast, Aubrey is fulfilled with the simplicity of parenthood and an ‘ordinary’ job. I easily read it in one sitting.

Crudo, Olivia Laing

90 pages

With the same kind of rhythm as Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Halle Butler’s The New Me, Crudo follows Kathy, a 40-year-old writer who’s getting married and whose inner life plays out against the backdrop of the Trump administration and real-world news.

“Kathy was writing everything down in her notebook, and had become abruptly anxious that she might exhaust the present and find herself out at the front, alone on the crest of time – absurd, but sometimes don’t you think we can’t all be moving through it together, the whole green simultaneity of life, like sharks abruptly revealed in a breaking wave?”

It’s experimental and clever.

Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bess Kalb

167 pages

This does so much in ~200 pages. It’s a memoir, told from the point of view of Bess’ grandmother, who is drawn so vividly and tenderly you feel as though you have been grandmothered by her. It’s about loss, but it’s primarily about love:

“What have I always told you, Bessie? What have I always said? You’re my angel. I am you. I’m the bones in your body and the blood that fills you up and the meat around your legs. I’m the softness of your cheeks and the way they freckle in the summer, and I’m the streaks of rust in your hair, and I’m the nose under your nose and the eyes that narrow with fire and roll backward in delight at all the same things. I’m your style. I’m your laugh. I’m the rage in your heart that I’m not here. You’re the body I left behind. I made sure of that. From the moment I met you, I never stopped telling you my stories. Because nobody will write them but you.”

It made me even more thankful for my grandparents. I wish I wrote it.

Any short books that you’ve loved and would recommend?

Until next time,

Britt