eduify | write faster

By Adam Krause

Now that we’re in the thick of the holiday season, many of us are going the distance to see family, whether on a plane, Amtrak or Greyhound. Long, boring trips are the ideal time to make a dent in your reading list. Here are ten books, each under 250 pages, perfect for one day of travel in each direction. Just don’t read them while driving on the interstate.

1) Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Orwell is best known for his allegories of political paranoia, 1984 and Animal Farm. This is his first published book. Though he called it fiction, it is an account of his experiences working as a low-wage dishwasher in Paris and being homeless in England. It is written with wit and keenly observational prose that keeps it fresh today, and provides such advice as how to keep customers from detecting rats in a poorly run restaurant and how to use a taut rope as a pillow while sleeping on the street.

2) St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

This short story collection, published when its author was only 25, is absolutely crazy. Russell’s subjects range from the title story, about a school run by kindly nuns whose mission is converting the children of werewolves into real human girls, to a story about a family of minotaurs heading west on a covered wagon. No matter how bizarre the situations, Russell never loses sight of her characters’ human side.

3) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

This first novel by Indian journalist Aravind Adiga is narrated by a chauffeur in New Delhi who murders his rich employer. The chauffeur, who comes from a remote village that he refers to only as “the Darkness,” ruled by greedy landlords that resemble storks and wild boars, makes clear that India’s recent economic rise is only for a few, and that most Indians still have to seize whatever they can get. The novel has been criticized by Indian intellectuals who doubt Adiga’s authority to write in the voice of India’s poorest citizens, but the wicked intelligence of the narrator as he maneuvers through one tricky situation after another makes the novel a fast, gripping read, whatever you think of its message.

4) Sula by Toni Morrison

Though the epic Beloved is better-known, many critics consider this slim novel Morrison’s best book. It chronicles the lives of two girls who grew up in the Bottoms, a rural black community: one who stayed behind to raise a family and the other, Sula, who left for the cities and returns to wreak havoc among the menfolk. The novel reminded me of a compressed One Hundred Years of Solitude; Morrison’s story moves so swiftly across three generations that it seems almost magical.

5) Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

Funnier than Pale Fire and less scandalous than Lolita, Nabokov again satirizes America and academia in this comic novel about a bumbling Russian professor in New England. Pnin’s adventures are small-scale (getting on the wrong train while trying to be clever with the timetables, and thinking a prized punch bowl has been smashed during a faculty dinner party) but his awkward charm eventually wins over even the narrator, who has spent most of the novel mocking him. He may even make you reconsider that nerdy professor who you gave a 0 to on RateMyProfessors.com.

6) An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination by Elizabeth McCracken

Elizabeth McCracken’s memoir of having gone to France to have her child, then losing the pregnancy, deals with harrowing and personal subject matter in a way that is never sentimental or simplified. There is room for witty observations about the French (who, at the public pool, “could gossip while doing the backstroke”) and yet the reader can’t help but feel the magnitude of the author’s grief through McCracken’s clear-eyed essayistic detail.

7) The Quiet American by Graham Greene

This is the story of the friendship between a jaded British war correspondent and a young, idealistic American who thinks his country should come to the aid of the French in Vietnam. The Brit, however, thinks that the American’s high hopes will only lead to bloodshed, and his private prayer is, “God save us always from the innocent and the good.” The book was written in 1955 but perfectly predicted the Vietnam War, and may come back into relevance with President Obama’s recent troop increase in Afghanistan.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

If you have seen the movie starring Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett, don’t think you know the story of The Virgin Suicides. The novel is notable for having been written in the first person plural, in which a Greek chorus of suburban boys tells the story of their longstanding obsession with the five enigmatic sisters who killed themselves. The boys hardly appear in the movie, but the beauty and originality with which Eugenides depicts their intense speculation about the doomed Lisbon family makes the novel a completely different experience.

9) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Japanese-British writer Kazuo Ishiguro has movingly captured the voice of an aging English butler who has given every part of his soul to a level of service that has come, in the modern world, to seem increasingly meaningless. The best demonstration of this comes during a scene in which the butler does his best to cater to a chaotic dinner party while his father dies in the upstairs bedroom; Ishiguro makes this unbelievable character choice seem absolutely plausible and sad. If you think you would never be interested in reading about a repressed butler, this novel might prove you wrong.

10) Embers by Sandor Marai

Finally, this novel by Hungarian anti-fascist, anti-communist (so not very popular in Hungary until recently) author Sandor Marai is a brilliant, sustained duel between a retired general and the childhood friend who betrayed him on a hunting expedition long ago. The dramatic confrontation takes place at the general’s castle, in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just before, for many Hungarians, the era when their whole world turned upside down.