August is hot. Vacation is calling. Books are too long. And yet, we must read them. Or at least carry them with us to the beach so that we can glance in their general direction.
In the age of baggage fees and carry-on only plane fares, the question of what to pack has never been more fraught.
What’s essential to the perfect holiday? The comfortable shoes that you should wear to walk around Madrid or the ones that complete your outfit?
When it comes to personal entertainment, what’s more vital? The high-profile best-seller everyone is talking about or the magazines that would slip so easily into your suitcase’s slim front compartment, the one that serves no purpose?
This year, you need not make the hard choice. These five super short books – each about 150 pages or less – are super satisfying reads that will eat up less of your baggage allowance than an extra pair of sandals.
1. Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
The briefest novel on our list is Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954 when Françoise Sagan was still a teenager herself. (If you find a copy that’s longer than 100 pages, prepare for a lengthy introductory essay.) Ostensibly, the book is about a teenager vacationing on the French Riviera with her father and his young, fashionable mistress. Really it’s about rich people on holiday realising their little manipulations have consequences – which is a hell of a souvenir.
2. The Key-Lock Man by Louis L’Amour
When the temperatures soar so much that reading feels almost impossible, I find genre fiction is the way forward: propulsive, formulaic, predictable. If you space out for a few paragraphs or even pages, you won’t be lost. Hondo is probably my favourite of Louis L’Amour’s westerns, but The Key-Lock Man is small enough to fit in your back pocket without sacrificing any of a proper western’s must-haves: a shoot-out, a damsel in distress, a (horse) race for one’s life.
3. Maigret’s Mistake by Georges Simenon
Let’s keep the genre fiction coming. Most of the Belgian writer Georges Simenon’s detective novels involving his most famous invention – Paris Commissaire Jules Maigret – are lighter than a tube of sunblock, but Maigret’s Mistake is an especially irresistible psychological thriller. It’s so easy to be distracted on holiday but this novel – about a murdered woman and her missing boyfriend – is so tightly wound that there’s no natural place to put it down.
4. Such Small Hands by Andrés Barba
Admittedly, this ghostly thriller about a violent cabal of orphans is not going to be everybody’s idea of a vacation read. But I dare you to find a book that delivers more twisty story and dark atmosphere by the kilo. When a new girl joins the orphanage after a horrific accident, what starts as playful interest evolves into a nightmare. You will read this book in a single sitting, I guarantee it.
5. Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
For those who insist on something more literary for vacation, may I suggest the debut novel from the criminally underread novelist Kaye Gibbons. The 1987 book is narrated by a middle-age girl from the American South, who, yes, is also an orphan trying to find a home after the death of her mother. Ellen’s childhood is challenging to read about but the sentences are so razor-sharp and the world of the rural South so palpable, you’ll be finished before you realise. Plus, it features a strong contender for the best opening line in literature Olympics: "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy."
