What are they? A loyal MR reader wants to know. Comments, of course, are open.
The best books under 100 pages
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any Lovecraft novella
Candide’s under 100? Borges or Cortazar short stories
Heart of Darkness
Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Siddharta; Heart of Darkness
non-fiction: Herman’s Vulgar Latin (trans. R. Wright) (for real)
death of ivan illich
War and Peace. In the new Microscopic Print edition.
Grounding on the Metaphysics of Morals -Kant
Second Treatise on Government -Locke (though you should read the first half of Hobbes’s Leviathan first)
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – Hume (slightly over the limit)
Book of Job
Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck, hands down.
The Old Man and the Sea
CDB! by William Steig
Flatland, by Abbott.
The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White
Flatland by Abbot
Silk, by Alessandro Baricco,
The Little Prince
Siddharta
The Little Prince.
Short stories don’t count; it has to be a book.
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean (slightly over 100 pages)
The Prince, also, The Little Prince
Personal favorites:
-Einstein’s Dreams (144 pages, but it’s physically small) by Alan Lightman
-Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
-A Universal History of Iniquity (122 pages, just a bit over) by Jorge Luis Borges
-Any of the books from Penguin’s Epics series (e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh)
Arrow’s Limits of Organization
Debreu’s Theory of Value
Off the top of my head: The Communist Manifesto; Mauss’s The Gift; The Prince; Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (just over, but only barely); Strayer’s The Medieval Origins of the Modern State; and Ernest Gellner’s Postmodernism, Reason and Religion.
Bridge of San Luis Rey
Also a bit longer than 100 pages,
But “The Law” and “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.”
Harry Frankfurt, “The Importance of What We Care About.” Contains his famous and indispensable essay, “On Bullshit.”
a lot of repeats, people should read each others comments (or were those votes?)
Its 160 (small) pages, but I nominate Contradictions and Dilemmas by Kornai
Also, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth by Mises which comes as a book even though I guess its really a paper.
Slightly longer of course are Road to Serfdom and this collection of brilliant (under 100 page) essays.
A River Runs Through It by Norman MacLean (slightly over 100 pages)
Beat me to it. My second candidate was going to be another novella in a collection — “Morpho Eugenia” in A.S. Byatt’s Angels & Insects. But that turns out to be closer to 200 pages…rats.
Ah, here we go, if you exclude the “biological notes” at the end, Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology comes in under 100 pages.
Economical Writing, by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Almost anything from the Wooden Books series. The book Q.E.D. is a particularly nice example.
‘Night’ by Elie Weisel is 106 pages, I believe, and is the best short book not already on the list.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Perhaps it does not count but is the only work that can rival Notes of the underground( the first phycological novel): Warden No 6 Chekov.
The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
Marlowe´s Faust
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
The art of war Sun Tzu and
Manual Oracle and Art of Prudence by Gracian.The two books that complete the cicle with The Prince.
Maxims by La Rochefoucauld
My vote for the best Hemingway: the old man and the sea.
Billy Budd by Herman Melville
The Dickensonian-kafkian Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
And alomost every work by Shakespeare but for Marc Anthony and Cleopatra is under 100 pages
“The Dead” by James Joyce, even though it is not technically its own book.
So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba comes in at 96 pages. Amazing read.
Seconded. I only picked Things Fall Apart because more non-Africanists have heard of it. The list of really good African short novels lengthens easily.
miss lonelyhearts by nathaniel west!
The Seventh Man, by Graham Greene
A modest Proposal — Swift
1. The Prince
2. The Communist Manifesto
3. On Bullshit
Tears of my Melancholy Whores – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Metamorphosis- Kafka
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde- Stevenson
Transparent Things- Nabokov
Jealousy- Robbe-Grillot
The Invisible Man- HG Wells
The Time Traveller- HG Wells
The Mezannine- Baker
any Shakespeare play
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
In Praise of Shadows – Tanizaki
Moskva-Petushki by Venedikt Yerofeyev. The greatest novel about alcohol ever written. At least in the original Russian it clocks in under 100 pages, but the English translations seem to be around 130.
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov can be found sometimes as a stand-alone book.
What Does It All Mean? by Thomas Nagel. An extremely gentle introduction to philosophy.
“A Sorrow Beyond Dreams” by Peter Handke
“SkrewJack” by Hunter Thompson
“Tool” by Peter Sotos
The Hero and the Blues, Albert Murray
Liberalism, John Gray
Concerning the Spiritual In Art, Kandinsky
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
Heaven and Hell, Huxley
Intellectuals and Socialism, Hayek
Evolution of Cooperation, Axelrod
Omar Khayyam’s _Rubaiyat_, if that counts as a book (and if the _Tao Te Ching_ does, it certainly must). Musashi’s _Book of Five Rings_, for pretty much the same reasons as Sun Tzu’s _The Art of War_. Anything by Hume or Mill that clocks in at under 100.
Ian Deary wrote a good short introduction to the study of human intelligence called, well, _Intelligence_. _Godel’s Proof_ by Nagel & Newman is a classic, and whoever suggested Fermi’s _Thermodynamics_ has my respect. Finally, and possibly best: _What is Calculus About?_ by W. W. Sawyer, which is the best little intro to calc anyone could ask for.
It is VERY hard to find, but Travesty by John Hawkes is awesome (and about 132 pages).
entire book is a first person perspective of a guy in a car with his best friend and his daughter and how he is justifying to himself that he plans on crashing the car as an act of art.
Since the “Evolution of Cooperation” was already taken, might I suggest “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Frankel?
If you enjoy adventure and a cultural study on Africa via a wilderness education organization, In Mind / In Country is a good choice
Any Borges’ writing.
Animal Farm or The Little Prince.
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