Short book recommendations please

[Happydaze2]

For our little book club - we will only have a couple of weeks to read so as to squeeze in an extra meetup pre-Christmas, so needs to be short and sweet! 😊 Ideally a light, easy read but any genre. TIA

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagidawa and Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi are both short reads.

Clicked to say Claire Keegan

Just had a look at all the slim books on my shelf and would recommend these, but they’re not that wintry/Christmassy:
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth Von Arnim
84 Charing Cross Road by Helen Hanff
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Up at the Villa by W Somerset Maugham

Clicked to say Claire Keegan

Not read that one, but pity anyone reading Virginia Woolf

Eta Mn merged my two posts together 🤬

Ha ha re Virginia Woolf!
It was my suggestion to our book group for next month and was voted in (just!)

I remember reading To the Lighthouse years ago and was quite intrigued by the 'stream of consciousness' technique.

Hmm..... I wonder what everyone will say about it at our meeting ...

Diary of a Provincial Lady is a short book which is both very funny, and can also give rise to an interesting discussion regarding the parallels between then and now societally and re: marriage and being a mother.

If you want something more weighty, then short stories might be the way to go. Hands down the best collection of short stories I have ever read is The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Beautiful writing and she says so much with so little.

Amazing response - thanks to you all! A few of the titles I have already read and I’d prefer something that’s new to me. I actually love the idea of A Christmas Carol which I’ve never read and would be spot on timing wise. I’ve also noted several other titles that we might read later. We are only a little group of 5 and have only been meeting a few months but loving it 😊

The Great Gatsby is not very long but it is not wintery/Christmassy!

I was also going to suggest A Christmas Carol but if you find others have already read that Dickens has written several Christmas books that aren’t too long so you could try one of those instead. A Christmas Carol is definitely the best of his Christmas books though!

A Painted Veil by Somerset Maughan. What a book!

Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift - great depth and insight with not a word wasted
Animal Farm, George Orwell - great for discussion
Flush, Virginia Woolf - writen from the point of view of a dog

Hermann Hesse: Siddartha
George Orwell: Coming up for Air
Dickens: A Christmas Carol
Virginia Woolf: Flush
Aldous Huxley: Chrome Yellow
Evelyn Waugh: Decline and Fall
Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Patrick Fermor: A Time of Silence

Yes, good choice.