Don’t have as much time for books as you wish you did? Just work with the time you do have and find some reading that doesn’t require a major time commitment. You will be just as entertained, enlightened, and informed by quick reads as you would be by longer ones. Here are some quality picks from our collection.
If you’re hungry for a good story, give Alice Munro a try. She is the contemporary master of the short story form and she won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, so it’s a good time to check out her work. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening means you can read an American classic in less than a 100 pages. If neither of those sound good, The Oxford Book of American Short Stories has a little something for every taste, from classic to contemporary.
In the mood for a nonfiction fix instead? Check out Wave, Sonali Deraniyagala’s heartbreaking and critically acclaimed 2013 memoir about her losing her sons, husband and parents in the 2004 tsunami. Never a City so Real is Alex Kotlowitz’s portrait of Chicago.
If you can’t decide between fiction and non-fiction, you may want to consider the yearly series The Best American Nonrequired Reading or even the very aptly named Short, which covers five centuries of writing, but doesn’t include a single story, poem or essay over 1250 words!
And if this post has you feeling a little squeamish because you’re not sure that everything has to be done quickly and you’d rather slow it down a little bit, please consider Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 Thinking, Fast and Slow.