48 quick reads to impress university admissions tutors and any friends you might have
1. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow (a big book in a few pages)
2. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch – Alexsander Solzhenitsyn (a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down)
3. The Outsider – Albert Camus (the ultimate re the emptiness and meaninglessness of life)
4. The Golden Gate – Vikram Seth (a prose poem – how strange)
5. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (tackling a whole lot for a slim volume)
6. For Esme with Love and Squalor – J D Salinger (the short stories of the famous author of Catcher in the Rye)
7. Dubliners – James Joyce (the best in Irish Fiction)
8. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (you’ve got to love Gatsby)
9. Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (they write books in Africa too)
10. The Life and Times of Michael K – J M Coetzee (another book out of Africa – 1983 Booker Winner – and might be voted the Booker of Bookers this year)
11. The Spire – William Golding (he did write more than Lord of The Flies)
12. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
13. On Chesil Beach – Ian McEwan (and a whole raft of other slim volumes with which he made his name)
14. Slaughter House 5 – Kurt Vonnegut (who destroyed Dresden?)
15. The Remains of the Day – Kasho Ishiguro
16. Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka (we all know that feeling)
17. The Essential tales of Chekhov – Anton Chekhov (Edited by Richard Ford)
18. The Road – Cormac McCarthy (will scare the bejesus out of you)
19. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller – Italo Calvino (pretentious as hell – but a good read)
20. Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth (his first, his shortest and his most infamous)
21. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (and speaking of infamous)
22. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks (and wishing to be infamous)
23. The Reader – Bernhard Schlink
24. Will Self – The Quantity Theory of Insanity (the big man in today’s literary world cutting his teeth)
25. At Swim Two Birds – Flann O’Brien
26. Candide – Voltaire
27. The Turn of The Screw – Henry James
28. A Universal History of Insanity – Jorge Luis Borges (and anything else by him – pretty insane stuff, but thoroughly enjoyable)
29. An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro (much lauded author of today – a short and beautiful book)
30. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis
31. The Man Who Was Thursday – G K Chesterton (terrific fun)
32. Chronicle of a Death Foretold – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (the master of magical realism just got shorter)
33. Pastoralia – George Saunders – (at least it’s new)
34. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
35. Fear and Trembling – Amelie Nothomb
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…and a more girly selection (as per repeated requests)…
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36. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
37. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
38. Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
39. The Hours – Michael Cunningham (winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
40. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
41. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
42. Notes on a Scandal – Zoe Heller
43. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
44. The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
45. The Bell – Iris Murdoch (not so short – in fact it’s not short at all, being very long – but a really good book with a great central female character)
46. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (of course – every girl’s favourite depression tract)
47. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
48. Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
…suggestions for the girly section are of course welcome…
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Not a word too long.