Pressed for time? 20 wonderful books you can read in one day | imaginary

Reading in one sitting is usually the domain of the short story—a form that depends largely on the reader’s pure, uninterrupted attention. But there’s something special about the intensity of starting and finishing an entire book in a single day. Of all my reading experiences, this was among the most memorable.

As a Booker Prize judge last year, faced with 153 books and just over six months to read them, my task was to try to turn each novel into a novel that could be read in a day. Although I loved the experience, it was not a recipe for satisfying reading.

Aside from Booker, everyone seems to be pressed for time. The Booker Awards recently published research co-authored by the Reading Agency stating that 35% of readers find it difficult to finish books. Publisher Vintage describes its new collection of “short masterpieces” – by writers including Nella Larsen, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison and Fyodor Dostoyevsky – as books suited to “the contemporary reading life”. And it’s true that if you choose a book with the right dimensions and take the right precautions (phone in another room, don’t open the door), reading a book in a day becomes a real possibility — especially as summer vacation approaches.

But what do you choose? This is where this list comes into play. It’s a personal choice, not a blanket choice. And I’ve omitted some great but perhaps uncommon candidates – Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, Ethan Frome. But all of these books, whether familiar or not, are worth a day of your time.

crowd
Natasha Brown
A hundred pages long and written in vignettes that leave plenty of white space on the page, there is something dazzlingly aggressive and startling about the economy of the association. Brown’s debut is narrated by a young black woman working in finance (Brown’s profession before she became a novelist). You succeeded. money; A loving, liberal, and generationally wealthy friend. She seems to have it all. But desperate rage boils from the depths of the book: “I am what we have always been to the Empire: pure, damned profit.”

Kick the bolt
Catherine Scanlan
Sonia is a horse trainer who has spent decades working at racetracks across America. In a note at the end of Kick the Latch, Scanlan thanks the enigmatic Sonya “for the conversations,” and this is a book full of rich and extraordinary details that come from a true insider. Priests bless the horses’ legs. Knights vomit to gain weight; Veterinarians administer B12 shots not only to the animals in their care but to the riders as well. In concise, restrained prose, Scanlan immerses us in the secrets of a closed world.

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, translated by H. T. Willits
There are many novels that take place entirely in a single day — “Ulysses,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Under the Volcano” — but few can also be read in an identical amount of time. Solzhenitsyn’s novel begins with a concentration camp scene depicting a hammer beating on a railway track, and ends 150 pages later with the eponymous character falling asleep. Between these points, we are immersed in the brutal daily struggle for survival, a struggle that represents life – or often death – in the Soviet labor camps.

Night in Chile
Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews
On his deathbed, the priest, poet, and literary critic Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix embarks on a stunning monologue that addresses falconry, war, Nobel Prize-winning writers, and Catholic guilt. Bolaño’s novella is a work of the highest order, a marvel of tone and rhythm. Her most audacious invention, a torture chamber operating under the guise of a literary salon, mixes Bolaño’s obsessive interest in literature, fascism, and violence so completely as to seem self-mocking. Of course, it turns out that it was taken from life.

Giovanni’s room
James Baldwin
David, the hero of Baldwin’s second novel, is a white gay American contemplating his Parisian love affair with a waiter named Giovanni. Much has been said about sexual and racial politics, but what is striking upon first reading is the intensity of the description. When David walks up to Giovanni, the gay bar’s newest employee, causing a stir among the patrons, he feels as if he is “moving into a magnet,” or “approaching a small circle of heat.” We feel that too.

Train dreams
Dennis Johnson
Johnson’s haunting, at times almost unbearably beautiful, account of the life of a railroad worker and logger has had a long journey to ubiquity. It was first published in the Paris Review in 2002, and did not appear as a book until 2011. Now, with the recent release of Clint Bentley’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, it has become Johnson’s best-known work. But for me, the film is weak beer next to the novella, whose grandeur is punctuated by the startling and surreal moments of everyday life.

monument
Alice Oswald
Being in the audience to see Oswald read the memoir—without consulting the text—is one of the greatest living literary experiences of my life. An “verbal tomb” that names more than 200 of the dead from Homer’s Iliad, her poem uses recurring chant-like stanzas and striking similes, taken primarily from the natural world, to construct a tomb of language. Consistently surprising, and utterly enjoyable, the poem demands to be read while listening to the song, in one concentrated sitting.

A state of hysteria (dora)
Sigmund Freud, translated by Anthea Bell
One of the few cases Freud wrote about from his patients, hysteria has been described as “a classic Victorian domestic drama”. Dora, whose real name is Ida Power, claimed she resisted sexual advances from her father’s friend. Whatever you think of Freud’s methodology – here he often sounds more like a detective than a doctor – his narrative skill in revealing aspects of the case, especially the links between Dora’s symptoms and her dreams, is clear.

Comfort of strangers
Ian McEwan
There is more than just a Freudian hint in McEwan’s strangest novel. “Colin and Mary had never left the hotel so late before,” he wrote in the opening pages of this abhorrent book, “and Mary had to attribute much of what followed to this fact.” And so begins the short, brutal descent into manipulation and violence, as these two vacationers fall into the orbit of another couple, and under their spell. The book only becomes more menacing by blending its sense of menace with laziness and dream-like beauty.

Cost of living
Deborah Levy
The second volume of Levy’s “living autobiography,” The Cost of Living, describes the end of a long marriage and the death of the author’s mother. Ending a marriage means downsizing, which is difficult to achieve with two children who need time and space. Writing requires the same thing, and this is a book, in part, about a writer who is brave enough to define herself as a writer. And the sight of the e-bike and the flat chicken are indelible.

When we stop understanding the world
Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West
Fictional articles? Essay fantasies? Realistic novel? How best to categorize Lapatut’s addictive exploration of mathematical and scientific concepts and their authors, from rivals Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger to the tortured Alan Turing and the reclusive genius Alexander Grothendieck? Perhaps it would be better to forget about classification and simply dive into a book that embodies the strangeness and importance of the fundamental scientific achievements of the past two centuries, and the price that these discoveries have imposed on reason.

Wittgenstein’s nephew
Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McClintock
The semi-autobiographical account of Thomas Bernhard’s friendship with Paul Wittgenstein (actually Ludwig’s first cousin once removed, but try making this the title of the work) shows the notoriously sour Austrian writer at his most personal. The book offers a moving account and sometimes desperate exposé of male friendship: “The most valuable relationship I have ever had with another man is the only relationship I have been able to endure for more than a short time.”

The spare room
Helen Garner
When a friend gave me a copy of Garner’s autobiographical novel as a birthday present, I thought of cancer as something that had happened to other people. When I read it, it happened to me twice. The Spare Room is largely taken up with Helen’s friend Nicola arriving in Melbourne in search of an alternative treatment for her terminal cancer. Garner’s descriptions of this period, of the unforgettable beginning of their friendship drinking vodka on a jetty at night, and of the “remnants of her care” for Nicola, use stark simplicity to reveal the desperate complexity of death and testimony to death.

Fever dream
Samantha Schoebelintranslated by Megan McDowell
A panic attack disguised as a novel, Fever Dream takes the form of a dialogue between Amanda, who is in hospital after losing her sight, and her friend Carla’s young son, David—whom Carla believes, as she previously told Amanda, has been replaced by someone or something else. Meanwhile, where is Amanda’s daughter? While every book on this list benefits from being read once, it’s almost impossible to walk away from Fever Dream before turning the final page.

Driver’s seat
Muriel Spark
Liz, the main character in Spark’s still shocking 1970 novel – a favorite of her works – is “neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her nose is shorter and wider than it would appear in the form created partly by the method of identification, and partly by actual photography, which will soon be published in newspapers in four languages.” The book is a great lesson in telling readers that they are headed to a terrible place and making them hope that things will turn out well even though they know they won’t.

Vegetarian
Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith
Long before receiving the Nobel Prize, Hahn made her English-language debut with this, her fifth novel. The questions multiply as we read. Why does Young Hye’s husband get angry when she stops eating meat? What’s up with her brother-in-law’s vegetarian obsession? Is this related to her later desire to turn into a tree? Hahn’s novel is compelling, both because of its ambiguity and in spite of its ambiguity, given that her obsessive return to images of invasive bodies is deeply rooted in the minds of her readers.

Seven brief lessons in physics
Carlo Rovelli, translated by Simone Carnell and Erica Segre
There is something very simple about the way Carlo Rovelli, the physicist who originally wrote these short articles for an Italian newspaper, conveys very complex ideas. It’s not that we walk away from the book fully aware of general relativity, quantum gravity, the inelegance of the Standard Model, etc., but it helps us understand the fascinating range of concepts it elegantly defines. Unlike Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, you’ll actually finish it in 79 pages.

Lolly Willows
Sylvia Townsend Warner
One of the true origins of 20th-century English literature, Townsend Warner’s writing career began with this very strange novel 100 years ago. It opens conventionally enough, with nice young Lully departing from London for the country. Then he happily begins smashing together literary genres, some of which weren’t even written down in 1926. Nature writing, feminism (“Women know they’re dynamite,” declares Lawley), folk horror and much more are mixed together, as Satan appears not as a mere concept, but as a flesh-and-blood Chiltern gamekeeper.

Little things like this
Claire Keegan
Just before Christmas 1985, coal worker Bill Furlong makes a shocking discovery at the “strong-looking” abbey looming over his small Irish town. The dominance of the church, and Furlong’s ability to challenge it, is central to this charming book. There is a simplistic reading that makes it a fable about a good man. It’s more complicated than that, and the question remains as to what might happen in the days following Furlong’s decisive, and perhaps rash, decision.

Sadness is the thing with feathers
Max Porter
Before Max Porter’s singular debut—part poem, part novel, part essay, part play—became an unexpected sensation, publishers had become resistant to short books. Without her example, one could imagine Samantha Harvey being asked to go and add 20,000 words to the 140-page Booker Prize-winning Orbital. But Porter’s vivid story, in which a human-sized crow emerges from the pages of Ted Hughes’s poetry into the lives of a grieving family, belies the notion that brevity must equal substancelessness.