While you sift through all the end of the year Best Books/Movies/Moments lists, they can present a daunting task. You had high ambitions about how much reading you would get done throughout the year and set an over optimistic Goodreads challenge. Now you have mere days to meet a yearlong goal, and some of these tomes are lengthy. Forget those lists. Instead close the gap any of these dozen titles, all of which can be read (or listened to) in a day. This is a list without the usual suspects, classics like Virginia Woolf or Hemingway or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The Awakening or any other high school AP reading list specials (all of which are around 6 hours). Ranked from longest to shortest reading length according to their recorded Audible audiobook times. The first two are double recommendations of the same length in similar genres. All of these picks are in the ballpark of a Netflix binge, in terms consumption time.
The Autobiography of Gucci Mane, Gucci Mane, 6 hours and 30 minutes / Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, 6 hours and 49 minutes
Two autobiographical accounts of overcoming hardship and triumph in the face of a less than friendly culture. You can read the magazine review we ran of Mr. Vance’s book here.
Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer, 6 hours / A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle, 6 hours 8 minutes
Two books that both have movies coming out next year. Both deal with fantasy worlds plagued by darkness.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman, 5hours and 50 minutes (read by the author)
A master of short fiction Neil Gaiman’s Ocean is an imaginative and eerie look at the innocence of childhood, monsters, and how we understand the fabric of reality.
Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates, 5 hours
While we’re in the water, here’s a #MeToo pick for the list. With the renewed interest in the sexual misconduct of our elected officials, let’s talk about the Chappaquiddick incident (which is also getting a movie next year) This is a novella from the perspective of a young woman on a drive home with a powerful man who holds her life in his hands as he runs his car off the road into a marsh.
A Colony in a Nation, Chris Hayes, 5 hours (read by the author)
It seems that despite the narratives America would like to tell itself, we are not living in a post racial world after all.
The American Spirit, David McCullough, 4 hours and 13 minutes (read by the author)
Perhaps the most surprising name on a list of quick reads is two-time Pulitzer winner McCullough who is famous for producing tomes about the lives of the Founders. This is a collection of his speeches.
The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka, 3 hours and 55 minutess
More lyrical than straight prose, this book is told through first-person plural narration similar to a greek chorus. Punches above the weight of its pages dealing with the stories of women who emigrated only to have their dreams smothered and snuffed out.
The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis, 3 hours and 50 minutes
In light of a recent study that portrays American’s as unhappy wusses who report pain at a higher rate than the rest of the world, it seems as good a time as any to read C.S. Lewis’s meditation on the matter.
Citizen, Claudia Rankine, 1 hour and 37 minutes
The shortest in length on the list, but among the more dense. This is for anyone who still thinks Colin Kapernick’s bended knee is about the flag (spoiler: it’s about police brutality).
Bonus poetry collection: I would make this entire list poetry collections, I really would, but taking into consideration level of difficulty, this would defeat the purpose of giving quicker paced books to round out the year.
Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar, 100 pages that could take you anywhere from 5 hours to a lifetime to absorb
The debut collection from the poet laureate of Twitter dealing with alcoholism and sobriety. Come for the imagery, stay for the syntax.
