All these novels have fewer than 200 pages, some of them fewer than 100. Together they make up the first couple of batches of books in my family’s Small Book Club, which is designed to get us all reading despite our shriveled brains and crippling TikTok habits.
More about it on the blog: Nabokov vs Hugo.
Batch two
We have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson (review).
Memorial, Alice Oswald.
The Hothouse by the East River, Muriel Spark.
The Word for the World is Forest, Ursula K. Le Guin.
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Nose, Nikolay Gogol.
Faraway, the Southern Sky, Joseph Andras.
To be Taught, if Fortunate: a Novella, Becky Chambers.
Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector (review).
Who was Changed and who was Dead, Barbara Comyns.
The Hole, Hiroko Oyamada.
This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar.
The Diary of a Nobody, George and Weedon Grossmith.
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (review).
In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan (review).
Silas Marner, George Eliot.
Batch one
Autumn Quail, Naguib Mahfouz (review).
Train Dreams, Denis Johnson (review).
The Eye, Vladimir Nabokov (review).
Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov.
We are Made of Diamond Stuff, Isabel Waidner
L.A. Woman, Eve Babitz.
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor.
The Royal Game: A Chess Story, Stefan Zweig.
The Summer Book: A Novel, Tove Jansson.
Strange Weather in Tokyo, Hiromi Kawakami.
Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan.
Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain.
The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Push, Sapphire.
Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.