So in honor of World Book Day, I thought it was about time that Book Break did a very
special video all about books you can read in a day. Big books can be great; there
is plenty to get your teeth into, they can engulf you in one story for weeks, if not
months on end and they even make excellent paperweights.
But if you're like me, then every now and then you just need a short book.
Something under 200 or even 150 pages that you can read in a day or is easy to take
with you on your commute. For you, I have 5 book recommendations. First up is
China Mieville's surreal and mysterious novella The Census Taker. This story
follows our protagonist, who narrates to us his childhood growing up in a remote
location although they are near a small town, he and his parents live in an
isolated home, a little further up the mountain. There's undertones of the surreal
and the magic realism and we get the sense that something dark is going on.
His mother prefers never to leave him alone with his father and our book
begins in the middle of the story when this little boy runs down from the
mountainside because something terrible has happened. If you're looking for
something a little bit lighter, a little boy whose story you might want to hear
about is The Little Prince. A children's classic for all ages originally written
in French. This book follows a pilot who crash lands in a desert to find a
strange little prince from another planet who has a lot of questions about
this new world he finds himself in. It's about the human condition and
imagination and it very quickly became a modern fable. If you haven't read this
one yet yet you seem to hear everybody talk about it, then you have no excuse
know that you know how short it is. This comes in at a mere a hundred and
fourteen pages - with illustrations. But whilst on the topic of classics I had to
mention - and you may be able to guess this author already - because a lot of his
books are rather short: Shakespeare. This is Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's
Dream. This is my personal favorite although
Macbeth is a close second. For a play coming in at only 88 pages
in the Macmillan Collector's Library Edition, there is a ton going on within
pages. It is a play within a play. We follow multiple different sets of characters
including the queen and the king of the Fairies, Oberon and Titania, a group of
traveling performers and two princes and two princesses, who get sucked into the
messy world of the fairies, with lost bells playing here and there and
everywhere. It's hilarious and magical and if you've only got a day to spend
reading of book, then you couldn't take much better. But from Shakespeare to
a somewhat more recent release, I have What Belongs To You by Garth Greenwell. This
is a new paperback edition which comes out this year and is the longest book
in this video, but still only a hundred and ninety-one pages. This story
is so enthralling that you won't even notice the time flying by. This follows
a teacher in the United States of America, struggling with his current
relationships as he reflects back on growing up as a young gay man in 1990s
southern America and his struggle with homophobia even from those he loved. If
you want to know how to pack a punch in under 200 pages, then you need to read
this book. Lastly I had to include a book from a genre of literature which is
rarely over 150 pages and that is a collection of poetry. It was difficult to
pick which collection though because so many wonderful ones are short but I
decided as it was International Women's Day next week I would go for Feminine
Gospels by Carol Ann Duffy. Talking about packing a punch in very few pages Carol
Ann Duffy manages to do it in 65 pages. These poems draw on historical
archetypes of women to explore the female identity in a modern context and
create modern myths for real women. Her imagery is visceral and her pictures
diverse and given how little time it would take you to read this collection,
what are you waiting for? But those are my 5 recommendations for this video, there
are of course plenty more short books out there, so please do share your
recommendations in the comments, if for nobody else but myself. In the meantime
if you want to give this video a wee thumbs up if you liked it that would be
wonderful and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and until next
week!