I’m not a fan of squinting at pages of text on my phone, nor do I like lugging a huge tome around, which calls for a little preparation for when I’m not at home. I visited the library this evening, scanning its shelves for the thinnest books which might make for suitable reading during lunch breaks or pockets of free time. Ideally, they would be small, light, with big fonts and enough white space, around the 50-page mark or less, and consist of only one story.
These five books met the criteria:
- The Nose (Nikolai Gogol, 1836)
- Bartleby the Scrivener (Herman Melville, 1853)
- Brokeback Mountain (Annie Proulx, 1997)
- The Tale of the Unknown Island (Jose Saramago, 1999)
- Chess (Stefan Zweig, 1943)
“The Nose” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” are published under Melville House Publishing’s The Art of The Novella series, and “Chess” is also labelled as a novella. I’m not sure about the other two. Not sweating the small stuff over terminology for now, as long as I keep the reading habit going.
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