If you want to read some short books, here are some ideas:
1. A Walk to Remember – Nicholas Sparks (184 pages)
It is 1958 and seventeen-year-old Landon is revelling in his youth: dating girls and even claiming to have been in love. He is a world apart from shy, reclusive Jamie Sullivan, a Baptist’s daughter who carries a bible with her school books, cares for her widowed father and volunteers at the orphanage. But fate will intervene.
Forced to partner up at the school dance, Landon and Jamie embark on a journey of earth-shattering love and agonising loss far beyond their years. In the months that follow, Landon discovers the true depths of the human heart, and takes a decision that is so stunning it will lead him irrevocably down the road to manhood . . .
2. When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi (158 pages)
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live.
When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity – the brain – and finally into a patient and a new father.
Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both.
3. Traveling on One Leg – Herta Müller (193 pages)
Irene is a fragile woman born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from her native country to West Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within the orbit of three troubled men, while simultaneously embarking on an inner exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.
4. Of Love and Other Demons – Gabriel García Márquez (158 pages)
Nobel Prize winner and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez blends the natural with supernatural in Of Love and Other Demons – a novel which explores community, superstition and collective hysteria.
5. The reader from the cave – Rui Zink (113 pages)
The Anibaleitor tells the story of a young man who, escaped from the “guard of the kingdom”, embarks on a journey in search of a mythical and fabulous animal, the Anibaleitor.
Book of adventures, it is above all a book of adventure of reading. In this magnificent novel, Rui Zink can be both fun, didactic, moving and, as always, stimulating.
6. Félix et la source invisible – Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (136 pages)
Félix, 12 ans, est désespéré. Sa mère, la merveilleuse Fatou, qui tient à Belleville un petit bistrot chaleureux et coloré, est tombée dans une dépression sans remède. Elle qui incarnait le bonheur n’est plus qu’une ombre. Où est passée son âme vagabonde ? Se cache-t-elle en Afrique, près de son village natal ? Pour la sauver, Félix entreprend un voyage qui le conduira aux sources invisibles du monde. Dans l’esprit de Oscar et la dame rose et de Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt interroge les mystères de l’animisme, la puissance des croyances et des rites issus d’une pensée spirituelle profondément poétique. Il offre aussi le chant d’amour d’un garçon pour sa mère.