Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die discussion

What are some really short books on the list? Say well under 200 pages/novellas/short stories?

I know of:
The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe, 36 pages
The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe, 22 pages
The Purloined Letter by Poe, 48 pages
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy, 86 pages

I just finished The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which I liked reading, and that gave me courage for staring on Anna Karenina,… well, someday...

Please add to the list.

Most of these I've read or own & know the page count is (more or less) correct. However, my spreadsheet currently thinks David Copperfield is only 126 pages, so take the goodreads page numbers with a grain of salt.

The Nose by Nikolai Gogol <100 pages
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, 48 pages
Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, Miss L (Locust is not included on the list) is 58 pages
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, 78 pages
Chess Story by Stefan Zweig, 84 pages
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 86 pages
The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, 86 pages and 167 pages respectively
Silk by Alessandro Baricco, 91 pages
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ, 96 pages
Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet, 103 pages
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, 107 pages
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, 110 pages
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, 112 pages
Woman At Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, 112 pages
The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind, 115 pages

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, 116 pages
The Lover by Marguerite Duras, 117 pages
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, 123 pages
Almost Transparent Blue by Ryū Murakami, 126 pages
The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy, 128 pages
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber, 128 pages
The Blind Owl by Sadegh Hedayat, 130 pages
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 130 pages
The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon, 142 pages
Strait is the Gate by André Gide, 148 pages
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton, 150 pages
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, 152 pages
Erewhon by Samuel Butler, 163 pages
Moscow to the End of the Line by Venedikt Erofeev, 164 pages
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 180 pages

Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (160 pages)
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
Summer by Edith Wharton

Liz M wrote: "... However, my spreadsheet currently thinks David Copperfield is only 126 pages"

Do you have a spreadsheet with pages?

Wow, this list is fantastic. Gives me hope that I can reach my goal. There is quite the discrepancy between what GoodReads says for David Copperfield (974 pages) and what your list says. Tend to believe your list is the more accurate on this.

The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark (which is an upcoming group read) is short. My copy is 106 pages.

There's also*:

The Yellow Wallpaper
Amok and Other Stories
The Turn of the Screw
The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life
The Body Artist
The Year of the Hare
Yes
The Cement Garden
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Heart of Darkness
Kitchen
Junky
Black Water
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The Street of Crocodiles
The Crying of Lot 49
Time's Arrow
Breakfast at Tiffany's
This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Fatelessness

*I use all 3 versions of the list.

Heart of Darkness may be short, but I certainly wouldn't pick it up for a quick, easy read. You'll quickly regret it.

Melissa wrote: "Heart of Darkness may be short, but I certainly wouldn't pick it up for a quick, easy read. You'll quickly regret it."

Thanks for the warning, perhaps I'll leave it until the end.

Jette wrote: "Liz M wrote: "... However, my spreadsheet currently thinks David Copperfield is only 126 pages"

Do you have a spreadsheet with pages?"

Yes. At one point I had all of the 1001-books on a 1001 shelf on my goodreads account. I then exported all my books to an excel document & deleted the non-list books & the data-columns that didn't interest me.

(From the Goodreads help page:
How do i import or export my books?
To import your books from a csv, txt, or xls file, click on my books then on import. Then follow the instructions on the right side of the page. The batch upload may take several minutes to process, depending on how large your file is. You can also export your books to excel from the same page.)

So, the page data is from goodreads. I also appreciate the publication year columnI got form goodreads, even though it, too, is not always accurate.

Oh, and according to my spreadsheet, approximately 200 list books from the 2008 list are less than 200 pages. I'll come back to this thread and continue adding books as time/mood allows.

I'm pretty sure David Copperfield is a doorstopper. Sometimes books get erroneously combined- like a study guide about David Copperfield can get included as an edition of it. Also, it could be a typo- that edition could have been 1126 pages and someone inputted it as 126. Also, if you add an audiobook version on GR I believe page numbers comes up as hours.

I remember David Copperfield as being considerably longer than 126 pages, but as it has been more than 30 years since I read it, and then a library book, I couldn't say which edition nor page length. I would guess somewhere around 450-500, but I could be off - way off.

My edition of David Copperfield is 896 wonderful pages.

If I remember correctly Michael Kohlhaas is a short story and Agnes Grey is rather short as well. But David Copperfield is a tome, however A Christmas Carol is a great Dickens novel and only about a hundred pages or so.

The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela, 151 pages
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, 160 pages

Wikipedia says 721 pages for David Copperfield.

@Liz M: That was smart! Putting all the 1001-books on a 1001 shelf at quite some work. And it seems that one cannot export the existing 1001 self.

Is there any chance you could upload your spreadsheet somewhere? Google docs perhaps?

Goodreads includes all the pages in the edition, the introduction, the preface, the appendices etc. Which is why it may differ from edition to edition.
David Copperfield is a large book, my version was 800 pages plus.
A short but brilliant book is Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Jette wrote: "Is there any chance you could upload your spreadsheet somewhere? Google docs perhaps?..."

I second this! A spreadsheet with page numbers sounds awesome!

The Devil's Pool by George Sand, 86 pages - 160 pages (depending on edition)

This is a great topic! Sometimes I just want a short read so thanks for all the suggestions :)

Most editions of Go Down, Moses are 300+ pages.

Seem to remember that the copy of Go Down, Moses I read was also 300+ pages.

Exercises in style by Raymond Queaneau
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe

Both very short, and I really enjoyed Young Werther, trying to get my hands on God bless you Mr Rosewater by Vonnegut, also short.

Memoirs of Martinus Scriberlus.

Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Oranges are not the only fruit - all three by Jeanette Winterson

Barrabbas by Par Lagerkvist

At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror by HP Lovecraft (title story is 85 pages)
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (96 pages)

Call of the Wild is short, depending on what edition you get. Even better, it's an awesome, interesting, really fast read.

"Girls of Slender Means," by Muriel Spark.

Death in Venice may be only 96 pages long but it was the longest 96 pages I have ever read. I had to read virtually every paragraph at least twice. Be warned.

One comment: As noted above, a short book isn't necessarily a quick, easy read! And some short books are not worth reading at all, but at least you can feel you didn't waste a lot of time on them.
Some of my favorite shorts include:
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Animal Farm
Of Mice and Men
A Christmas Carol
A Modest Proposal (not a novel but a satirical essay, by the way)
Summer
The Little Prince
The Castle of Otranto
The Call of the Wild
The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (by Samuel Johnson)

Then of course there are quite a few short stories on the list, like Poe.

One comment: As noted above, just because a book is short, doesn't necessarily mean it will be a quick, easy read. And not all short books are worth reading at all, but at least you don't feel you've wasted a lot of time on them.

Among the shorts listed here, some of my favorites that I would definitely recommend are:

Of Mice and Men
Animal Farm
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Call of the Wild
A Christmas Carol
A Modest Proposal (not a novel, but a satirical essay, btw)
The Little Prince
Agnes Grey
The Castle of Otranto
Summer
The Old Man and the Sea

And of course there are several short stories on the list, like Poe.

Note: Some books are listed with a lot more page numbers than the actual narrative text, especially classic literature which includes additional elements like an Introduction, appendix, explanatory or end notes, author biography, etc. For example, my copy of The Castle of Otranto has 159 numbered pages, plus another 40 pages of introductory text (numbered with small Roman numerals). The text of the story itself is only 83 pages long.
Along with keeping a list of books I read, I also note the number of pages, and only count what I actually read.

4evagreen wrote: "Death in Venice may be only 96 pages long but it was the longest 96 pages I have ever read. I had to read virtually every paragraph at least twice. Be warned."

I thought this book basically sucked.

Four items: A Modest Proposal, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Yellow Wallpaper are an essay and short stories and can all be read in, oh, an hour or two? They are all on the list. I spread mine out to read after longer works.

Chess Story is another really short story, and one of the best books I've read so far from the list, long or short.

I was looking for a list of page counts on Google, and I happened across a post on the blog for a "1001 Books Challenge" (http://books1001.livejournal.com) in which the blogger lists page counts and statistics. (This is neither my blog nor the blog of anyone I know.)

If you scroll down to the end of the post, there is a convenient list. I am not fully sure which edition this blogger/challenge organizer is using, but it's a good reference point.

http://books1001.livejournal.com/1660...

That's quite interesting Candiss, thanks for sharing! The editions used for the page count seem to be hardcovers:

"Since page counts vary between editions, spellchecker2 used the hardcover as a default reference; thus, these are only approximations."

Sandi wrote: "That's quite interesting Candiss, thanks for sharing! The editions used for the page count seem to be hardcovers:

"Since page counts vary between editions, spellchecker2 used the hardcover as a d..."

Oh, I meant "which edition of the 1001 list," Sandi. :) Sorry for being unclear!

Candiss wrote: "Oh, I meant "which edition of the 1001 list," Sandi. :) Sorry for being unclear! "

Oh, right! I think it's the 2006 edition because I think I've seen some books on their list that got cut in the second edition...but I could also be mistaken.

Animal Farm and Driver's Seat by Muriel Sparks

Der Richter und sein Henker a short and easy book to read.

I just started reading Sexing the Cherry, which, so far, is a really easy read. The story's engaging, & it seems to be a fairly short book as well. it came in this morning on an inter-library loan :) I have ordered Driver's Seat & The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as well.

Veronika Decides to Die is very good and short.

This has probably been mentioned already but I found The Postman Always Rings Twice a short easy, interesting read.

This is a great thread. Sometimes, I shy from some titles because I'm not sure I'll be able to finish them, but knowing I can pick them up and finish in one lazy afternoon is a great encouragement.

I'm going to write a list tomorrow so I can hit the library Monday for shorts to work through over the holidays so I can knock as many of those out as possible. We have a 15 hour ride each way to visit family, plus an 8 hour ride in the middle to get from one set of parents to the other in different states, good opportunity to get some reading done :)

Also The Left-Handed Woman 87 pages
Pavel's Letters 142 pages (was incorrectly listed as 242 pages).

I can't see that anyone has mentioned The Life and Death of Harriett Frean which I remember as being really quite short. Not sure if it's less than 200 pages (I'm sure it would be close) but it's a much 'easier' read than something like Animal Farm.

[Just checked; 160 pages apparently]

Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan. The story is about 130 pages.