10 Best Short Books Less Than 250 Pages You Can Read in One Day
The one-sitting book isn’t just something you can read in one afternoon it’s something you should read in one afternoon.
The best one-sitting novels sweep you off your feet, whisking you away to another world, only to deposit you back on your doorstep a few hours later, stunned and transformed, seared in the fire of something new.
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Short Classics Under 250 Pages You Must Read
Not only short classics with conversational value but also I chose stories that each taught a valuable lesson. In these short classics, you can see perfect examples of human nature.
1. Animal Farm
Manor Farm is like any other English farm, expect for a drunken owner, Mr Jones, incompetent workers and oppressed animals. Fed up with the ignorance of their human masters, the animals rise up in rebellion and take over the farm. Led by intellectually superior pigs like Snowball and Napoleon, the animals how to take charge of their destiny and remove the inequities of their lives. But as time passes, the realize that things aren't happening quite as expected.
Animal Farmis, one level, a simple story about barnyard animals. On a much deeper level, it is a savage political satire on corrupted ideals, misdirected revolutions and class conflict-themes as valid today as they were sixty years ago.
2. The Pearl
The Pearl is a novella by the American author John Steinbeck. The story, first published in 1947, follows a pearl diver, Kino, and explores man’s purpose as well as greed, defiance of societal norms, and evil.
Steinbeck's inspiration was a Mexican folk tale from La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, which he had heard in a visit to the formerly pearl-rich region in 1940.
3. The Thing Around Your Neck
In 'A Private Experience', a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman whose dignity and faith force her to confront the realities and fears she's been pushing away.
In 'Tomorrow Is Too Far', a woman unlocks the devastating secret that surrounds her brother's death.
The young mother at the centre of 'Imitation' finds her comfortable life threatened when she learns that her husband back in Lagos has moved his mistress into their home.
And the title story depicts the choking loneliness of a Nigerian girl who moves to an America that turns out to be nothing like the country she expected; though falling in love brings her desires nearly within reach, a death in her homeland forces her to re-examine them.
4. The Old Man and the Sea
One of the greatest novels of the 20th century by one of the greatest writers in American history - THE BOOK THAT WON ERNEST HEMINGWAY THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the story of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish.
Here, in a perfectly crafted story, is a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements in which he lives. Not a single word is superfluous in this widely admired masterpiece, which once and for all established his place as one of the giants of modern literature.
5. The End We Start From
Megan Hunter's honed and spare prose paints an imagined future as realistic as it is frightening. Though the country is falling apart around them and its people are forced to become refugees, this family’s world – of new life and new hope – sings with love.
In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as the baby's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds.
6. Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was
Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores.
And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats and adventures of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right.
For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.
7. A Christmas Carol
Embittered by life, Ebenezer Scrooge finds refuge in lonely isolation from society and from his past. Yet his well-patterned life is shattered in a single night of nostalgia, regret, and grim foreboding.
A Christmas classic, Charles Dickens' hopeful tale of innocence and rebirth continues to inspire readers the world over.
8. Annihilation
’A contemporary masterpiece’ guardian the first volume of the extraordinary southern reach trilogy now a major motion picture written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina) and starring Natalie Portman and Oscar Isaac for thirty years, area X has remained mysterious and remote behind its intangible border an environmental disaster zone, though to all appearances an abundant wilderness.
The southern reach, a secretive government agency, has sent eleven expeditions to investigate area X. One has ended in mass suicide, another in a hail of gunfire, the eleventh in a fatal cancer epidemic. Now four women embark on the twelfth expedition into the unknown.
9. Sense of An Ending
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.
The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
10. The Metamorphosis
Unabridged English value reproduction of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This wonderfully weird classic of an average family with an unacceptable member is studied in universities across the globe.
The Metamorphosis is multilayered and resonates in people in different ways, opening doors of thoughts that were often never even seen before. This beautifully tragic science fiction tale is provided to the reader in a slim volume with the full text at an affordable price.
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