I struggled a bit to nail down the book cravings I've been having the past few days, but I appreciate any effort to suggest something you love if it sounds like it might fit :>
I haven't read properly much in a few years, I find it fun but sometimes very taxing haha. I picked up an old book I'd been reading last and found it much much richer than I remembered – it felt like my mind had expanded since, and now I really want to try to engage with reading again and really digest the form.
I'd *really* love some recommendations for short or short-ish books! I want to read something really powerful and honest – it's ok if it's flawed, but something that's a real work of passion, really concerned with how it's inner logic reaches the reader. I want to see what a book can do to me.
I like something with a spiritual bent, but I also like things that are low-concept, irreverent, and deeply concerned with lived experience, rather than didactic.
It's not a must, but I'd love something raw whose themes relate to my life right now – so more about the personal than external social concepts or grand theories.
I know that's broad – but more interested in the mechanics of inner struggles and compromises than the mechanics of external ills if that makes sense. Immaturity, dreams, ghosts, suffering, injustice, narrative, art, faith, modernity, experience & memory, the weirdness of being alive.
I feel like I maybe got a bit lost in the sauce, despite trying not to, but if you just have a short book you love I'd love to hear it and hear why : >
by familiarfake
3 Comments
the driver’s seat by muriel sparks
I think you’d like **Piranesi** by Susanna Clark. It’s short, really well written and hits many of your requests. It’s essentially about a lonely character in a dream-like world who begins to learn that there is much more going on than what he currently perceives. Sorry, vague, but you know, spoilers and such.
Two amazing recommendations:
The Diving Bell & The Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby, ~150 pages, beautiful life story by a person who had “locked in syndrome” so he literally had to work with his OT to write the book letter by letter.
And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie, one of the *best of all time* mysteries and it’s ~ 200 pages