A List of Short Books

Emily Temple at LitHub, the Queen of the Lists, has published a list of short books today. She calls it, The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages Or, 50 Afternoons Well Spent. As she says:

About a month ago, we published a list of 50 of the best contemporary novels over 500 pages, for those of you who suddenly have a lot of extra time on your hands. But for those of us who suddenly have a lot less extra time on our hands, or who just can’t really pay attention to anything anymore unless it’s a) short or b) what were we talking about? For us, I present this list of 50 of the best contemporary novels under 200 pages.

For our purposes here, “contemporary” means published (in English) after 1970. NB that I’m not making a distinction between novellas and novels—I’m not sure there really is one—but I’m not including short story collections, or books that include a novella and stories. Finally, as ever, “best” is subjective, and this list is limited by time and space and the literary tastes of this editor.

There are many reasons why people  like to make lists. One often sees lists at the end of the year celebrating what critics consider the ten best movies, books, or television shows. The late Roger Ebert rebelled at this idea saying that since Moses came down from the mountain with ten commandments, film critics were required to create a ten best list every year. He rebelled by sometimes making a list of the best movies of the year that included multiple lists of ten. He also created a great movies series:

One of the gifts a movie lover can give another is the title of a wonderful film they have not yet discovered. Here are more than 300 reconsiderations and appreciations of movies from the distant past to the recent past, all of movies that I consider worthy of being called "great." - Roger Ebert

Personally, I think book lists represent a place to start, or, perhaps, a place to start a conversation.

Back to Temple's list.

There are two titles I think I would like to read soon:

Sayaka Murata, tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Convenience Store Woman (176 pages)

A dry, funny novel about, well, a woman who works in a convenience store. In our list of the best translated novels of the decade, editor Jessie Gaynor writes that “it reads, by turns, like a love story (woman meets store), an unusually charming employee handbook, and a psychological thriller—but somehow, it never feels disjointed. It was interesting to read this novel in the midst of a glut of English books about the dehumanizing nature of underemployment. Convenience Store Woman doesn’t, in my reading, take a stance on the Value of Work. Instead, it presents Keiko in all her glorious strangeness, and invites the reader to delight in it.”

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (144 pages)

Otsuka elegantly employs the first person plural to tell the story of a group of Japanese “picture brides” who come  to California to meet their husbands. In our list of the best novels of the decade, our editor Katie Yee writes that “the collective first person narration matches the subject matter beautifully; it mimics the immigrant experience, the way “others” are often seen as the same and the automatic camaraderie and safety we might find among those who share our stories. . . . I’ve re-read this novel many times, trying to understand how it can encompass such a wide scope of things. What Julie Otsuka has accomplished here is both an artful, intimate portrait of individual lives and a piercing indictment of history.”