Really Short, Really Good Books

Rainy day? Convalescing? Road trip or plane ride? Stressed out and need distracting? Have an hour or two to kill? Fat book too daunting at the moment? Need a skinny book for your little purse? Want a small feeling of accomplishment? Like a masterpiece in one gulp? In the mood to read a famous book in one, maybe two, sittings?

Try reading a really short, really good book. Or play. Or short book of short stories.

I'm filling my little library with good short reads this spring, all worth reading and rereading, all under 200 pages (sometimes depending on the edition). By the way the short books lists I've come across, in my opinion, are not very good---a lot of worthless or what I call nonexcellent books listed as if they are of equal value with some that are really good, which bugs me. So I made up my own, from Confucius to O'Connor. Like a cook who tries out all the recipes she shares, I never put anything in my tiny library that I haven't read and found worthwhile myself.

There should be something for everybody in this very eclectic list:

The Story of My Life, Helen Keller
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Billy Budd, Herman Melville
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer Abroad, Mark Twain
The Call of the Wild, Jack London
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
Wide Blood, Flannery O'Connor
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
A Bad Beginning, Lemony Snicket
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anthem, Ayn Rand
The Invisible Man, H.G. Wells
Mama's Bank Account, Kathryn Forbes
The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories, Thomas Hardy
Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
What Every Woman Knows, J.M. Barrie
84 Charing Cross Road, Helen Hanff
Night, Elie Wiesel
Two Old Women, Velma Wallis
Daisy Miller, Henry James
The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
The Secret Country of C. S. Lewis, Anne Arnott
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad
Missing May, Cynthia Rylant
The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories, Rudyard Kipling
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare
Dubliners, James Joyce
Tristan and Iseult, Rosemary Sutcliff
The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Trial, Franz Kafka
The Analects, Confucius
Selected Canterbury Tales, Chaucer
The Prince, Machiavelli
Beowulf

Hmm. Which one shall I pick first? How about a book a day? Don't you wish?