A Solid Literary Foundation in Eleven Short Books
Is it possible to become well read in a couple of months?
No. Being “well read” is a lifelong journey that includes the constant reading of new books and the classics you’d previously overlooked, not to mention rereading old favorites.
But within two months, it is possible to read a selection of great, short books that can provide a solid grounding in great literature. What follows is a 60-day foundation course comprising a selection of 11 short books (10 novels and a play) that expose the reader to many of the great voices in literature. Think of it as a self-taught Lit 101 course.
These books comprise a total of 1,384 pages (according to their metadata on Amazon). By reading 25 pages an hour, and an hour each day, someone could read all of them in two months and learn about a vast range of styles and genres. Those 1,384 pages may seem like a lot, but they’re fewer in total than War and Peace, which Amazon says is 1,440 pages long in the Penguin edition.
Here’s my list of short-but-mighty books, from shortest to longest, with the year they were published:
The Old Man and The Sea
Ernest Hemingway, 1952
87 pages
Hemingway’s last great novel tells the story of Santiago, an aging fisherman in the Caribbean, who toils to catch and bring home a great fish. Best known for its classic man-vs-nature struggle, one under-appreciated aspect of the book is its beautiful descriptions of nature.
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, 1843
94 pages
Everyone knows the story, but sitting down and reading this novella is a great introduction to Dickens and his colorful characters. When first reading Dickens, those characters can seem like cartoon cutouts, so a reader has to get through four or five of his novels (no mean feat) to begin to grasp his boundless imagination. A Christmas Carol is a great starting point.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad, 1899
108 pages
This one is not an easy read. Conrad’s recurring narrator Charles Marlow (who appears in other Conrad novels) tells of sailing upriver in Africa to encounter the legendary ivory trader Kurtz, who has become a demigod to the indigenous people surrounding his outpost. It’s a disturbing, dense novel and I often find it takes longer to read than the tiny page-count would indicate.
Animal Farm
George Orwell, 1945
112 pages
Published three years before his masterpiece 1984, Orwell used this simple allegory to bring out many of the themes raised in the later work. This satire of the Bolshevik revolution tells of barnyard animals rising up against their farmer to establish an egalitarian society only to be dominated by the pigs.
King Lear
William Shakespeare, 1608
116 pages
You know we had to have something by The Bard, and Lear is as good a candidate as any. One of his four great tragedies, the play tells of the aging Lear who decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters. Goneril and Regan joyfully accept this windfall, while the faithful Cordelia offends her father by showing she wants his love not his wealth. Often outshone by Hamlet, King Lear is nonetheless as perfect a tragedy as has ever been written.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818
118 pages
Twenty-year-old Mary Shelley produced a work of striking originality when she penned the story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who brought the dead back to life. This splendid book has survived being tarnished by Hollywood and a million parodies and stands as a magnificent story.
The Gospel of Mark
120 pages
I didn’t choose this book to spark a religious debate. I chose it because the impact of The Bible on Western literature up to the mid-twentieth century has been profound. Some academics argue that understanding The Bible is more important in literary appreciation even than the ancient classics. Mark is the shortest of the parallel gospels and provides a concise description of Jesus’ life. I could have put Job in here, but I thought we needed something from The Bible.
Silas Marner
George Eliot, 1865
126 pages
Silas Marner is a friendless weaver whose only love is his stash of gold. Though not as over-the-top nasty as old Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, he goes through a similar (though less miraculous) transformation. To fully grasp Eliot’s brilliance, you’d have to read Middlemarch, published six years later. But Silas Marner is a concise, profound book that is a bight-sized alternative to the 880-page tome.
Cannery Row
John Steinbeck, 1945
138 pages
Some writers can get away with overwriting their novels because their prose is so beautiful, and Steinbeck is a perfect example. This jolly tale of Doc and the band of drifters living a basic existence on the shores of Monterey, California, is a delight to read just for the author’s skills as a wordsmith. Its charming plot and colorful characters are added bonuses.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey, 2023
144 pages
This little book won Harvey a Booker prize for her research, originality and vision. It tells of six fictional astronauts in a space station orbiting the Earth again and again over a 24-hour period. Though all but lacking a plot, the book is notable because Harvey packs so much into this novella: six characters, all from different countries, viewing the world from above, and bringing with them a ton of scientific knowledge.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
180 pages
In its centenary year, we couldn’t ignore this book often named as the best novel ever written (though there’s a sizable slice of the literary community who don’t like it). And again, we probably all know the story of Jay Gatsby building a fortune through questionable means to impress his long lost love Daisy Buchanan. A book of spellbinding prose, I’d probably join those who rate it as the greatest novel ever written.
There are lots of gaps in this list. There’s no poetry, as I couldn’t decide on a single little volume of poems and poetry anthologies are generally too long for this exercise. I admit there’s not enough racial diversity in my choices, as I couldn’t come up with a small book by a Black author. I tried The Color Purple, but it’s more than 300 pages. And there’s no LGBTQ+ representation, though some scholars have spotted allusions to homosexuality in Frankenstein.
I wanted to add other books like True Grit by Charles Portis and The Quiet American by Graham Greene, but they were slightly too long (and I know they’d be on the list only because they’re personal favorites).
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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to my home page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.
