10 Best Short Books To Get You Out of a Reading Slump
At any given moment, Scott Simone has at least three books jockeying for his attention. He’ll never turn down a campus novel with a literary bent, nor will he hesitate to add yet another mystery to his Leaning Tower of Pisa-inspired to-be-read pile — which is built upon the bedrocks of too many short story collections, how-are-these-real true crime books, and classics waiting to be cracked open again. Topics that have him ripping through pages the fastest include closed-circle murders, unhappy professors, life-questioning philosophical deep dives, so long as they feature sharp sentences, a dark sense of humor, and at least a little malice.
He’s spent so much time in book shops over the years he is, to his wife’s chagrin, continuing to build a library that doesn’t quite respect the dimensions of the apartment meant to contain it.
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Even the most gluttonous bookworms among us go on a diet sometimes. We claim to be “reading” the same book for months. Maybe it racks up enough airline miles to earn elite status. It likely sits atop more coffee-shop tables than a “creative's” laptop. It most certainly spends every night vying for our attention from the nightstand. Still, the bookmark doesn't budge an inch. And, eventually, that beloved pastime seems more like a chore you’ve been putting off.
The obvious solution: put something bite-sized on your plate. But 100 pages of a man contemplating the futility of existence can feel considerably longer than a 500-page murder mystery. What you really need is something to whet your appetite again. Because the type of book that actually breaks a reading rut are the ones that make you break your promise of "just a few more pages" a few too many times — reigniting that unsatiating hunger to devour book after book.
'Up at the Villa' by W. Somerset Maugham (1941)
W. Somerset Maugham paints a pleasantly perfect picture at the start of Up at the Villa. Mary Panton is spending time at a friend’s villa overlooking Florence. And there’s a wealthy, respectable man vying for her hand in marriage. So all is looking well for the woman who’s still getting over her disastrous first husband. But then she meets a penniless Austrian refugee and invites him home. It’s the first step in an escalating series of catastrophes Maugham builds over 128 pages.
That perfect portrait begins to smear as Maugham picks apart the difference between being a good person and believing you're one. One of Mary's greatest talents is justifying her behavior, and Maugham makes it awfully easy to buy into those excuses. So you find yourself sympathizing with her one moment, then overcome with the urge to shake some sense into her the next. Maugham never moralizes, either. He's far more interested in exposing the hypocrisy of respectable society than deciding whether Mary deserves forgiveness. The novel's thriller-like pacing — and wicked sense of humor — leaves you wishing Maugham extended it another 128 pages.
'Perfection' by Vincenzo Latronico (2022)
Anna and Tom find something particularly irritating about getting everything they wanted, only to discover it isn't enough. They've built the life they imagined to a T when they moved to Berlin. They're successful graphic designers, their apartment looks like something out of an interiors magazine, and they've got the freedom to do pretty much whatever they please. But they're bored. And they can't quite figure out why. Maybe Berlin's lost its appeal, or perhaps they're in the wrong careers. Whatever it is, they can't shake the suspicion that everybody else has figured out something they haven't.
Vincenzo Latronico writes the novel in a strange way. There's no dialogue, and hardly a plot. But, perhaps since the feelings Anna and Tom have are so utterly relatable, it reads more like your own daydreams unfolding onto the page in front of you. Perfection puts all the little doubts and dissatisfactions you rarely admit to having into words you'd never be able to express. And that's what makes it so absorbing: recognizing so much of yourself in two people whose lives probably look nothing like your own.
'The Grifters' by Jim Thompson (1963)
Roy Dillon doesn't need to rob a bank to make a living. He prefers the smaller jobs, walking into a shop and confusing a cashier, using a little sleight of hand to stroll out a few dollars richer. Sure, the profits aren't enormous, but neither are the risks. At least until one of his marks catches on and leaves him fighting for his life. Enter Lilly, his estranged mother, and Moira, his girlfriend. Both women make their own dishonest livings, and neither takes kindly to the other's presence. It's one of the more fraught family reunions, especially considering everyone involved knows how to fleece the others.
Jim Thompson gets plenty of mileage out of the cons, but the nastiest tricks have little to do with money. Roy thinks he's too smart to fall for anybody's games, Lilly confuses protecting her son with controlling him, and Moira can make just about anything look like affection. Every conversation feels like another opportunity for a hustle; every kindness seeping in suspicion. And these three have spent so long learning how to cheat strangers that they hardly recognize when they're doing the same to themselves. There's no one you're particularly rooting for, but no possible way to stop reading to see what's coming down the pike.
'The Story of My Teeth' by Valeria Luiselli (2013)
Most people get false teeth because they need them. Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez buys a set supposedly belonging to Marilyn Monroe because, well, they're Marilyn Monroe's teeth. He then has them implanted in his mouth. And then he decides to auction off his own, inventing illustrious former owners for each to do so. Better known as Highway, he's a self-proclaimed world-class auctioneer who understands that an object's value has very little to do with the object itself. Give it a sufficiently interesting history, attach a famous name, and suddenly people can't wait to part with their money. Whether any of it is true hardly matters.
Valeria Luiselli has almost as much fun telling Highway's story as he does inventing his own. The novel is part art history, part philosophy, with a generous sprinkling of ridiculous anecdotes (often abandoning one story in favor of one that's more interesting). And the writing of the novel was unconventional as well: Luiselli wrote it in installments for workers at a Mexican juice factory, eventually incorporating their reactions into subsequent chapters. And that anything-goes approach gives the book a marvelous unpredictability.
'Chéri' by Colette (1920)
Colette introduces us to Léa de Lonval in her wonderfully overdecorated bedroom, with its rose-colored curtains, gilded furniture, and enormous brass bed. There's Chéri, her handsome, spoiled young lover, playing with her pearls and making cracks about her age. Léa gives as good as she gets. She's nearly 50, he's 25, and after six years together, they've developed quite the talent for insulting one another affectionately. But Chéri's mother has arranged for him to marry a younger woman, and both lovers seem convinced they'll have little trouble going their separate ways.
Chéri is an astoundingly absorbing read, as Colette brings that world completely to life: The sunlight pouring through Léa's curtains, the furnishings that have fallen a little out of fashion, the casual cruelties exchanged between people who've known each other for years. You feel as though you're sitting in the bedroom, watching their relationship come apart. And there's an intriguing bit of life imitating art: Colette herself went on to have an affair with her teenage stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenel, shortly after writing the novel. But there's far more to Chéri than its scandalous premise. Colette makes the pair's romantic fumbling alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, especially as their determination to appear indifferent gives away just how desperately they need one another.
'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson (1962)
The Blackwoods aren't exactly popular around town. Six years ago, somebody put arsenic in the family's sugar bowl, killing four people. The townspeople are convinced Constance Blackwood was responsible, never mind that she stood trial and walked free. That would be complicated enough, were it not for her overly odd younger sister Merricat. They're holed up in the family mansion bothering no one but themselves — though Merricat does make the occasional trip into town for groceries — but the neighbors make no secret of how much they'd prefer the surviving Blackwoods join their dead relatives.
Shirley Jackson puts us inside Merricat's head, which is a rather disturbing place to spend 150 pages. She wards off danger by randomly burying objects around the property and invents bizarre rituals. She also routinely imagines gruesome deaths for the people who annoy her. But the townspeople are so downright horrible towards them that it's surprisingly easy to sympathize with her. And that's where Jackson really starts having fun with the reader. Merricat's peculiar logic becomes so intimate that her most bizarre goings on make a certain kind of sense. So much so that when her version of events starts to demand questions, it's hard to escape her line of thinking.
'Ethan Frome' by Edith Wharton (1911)
Ethan Frome looks like a man who's survived something awful. He's barely 50, walks with a limp, and looks considerably older than his years. Everybody in Starkfield, Massachusetts, seems to know what happened to him, though nobody gives the stranger visiting town much of an explanation. So Edith Wharton takes us back to Ethan's younger days, when he's trapped in a miserable marriage to the perpetually ill Zeena. Then her cousin Mattie Silver comes to stay and help around the house. She's young, lively, and everything his wife isn't.
Wharton shows her hand from the jump: The reader knows something awful is coming for Ethan. So every moment of happiness he feels with Mattie seems heightened. It also amplifies the wicked wedded nightmare he has with Zeena, in which something as insignificant as breaking her pickle dishes becomes an ordeal. Wharton adds atmospheric tension on top, writing the bitter New England winter as oppressive as Ethan's marriage. And while the novel barely cracks 100 pages, she manages to make the inevitable feel suspenseful: You know it won't end well, yet find yourself hoping against hope you're wrong.
'Rent Boy' by Gary Indiana (1994)
Danny has a lot going on. He's studying architecture, waiting tables for self-important writers at a fashionable New York restaurant, and selling sex to wealthy businessmen with some rather unusual appetites. Suffice to say, he's become intimately acquainted with just about every variety of pretentious person in the city. But then another hustler introduces him to a doctor with a particularly gruesome side business, and he finds that, apparently, there's more than one way to make money off the human body.
Gary Indiana gives Danny free rein to recount his exploits through a snippy series of letters to a former lover. But he can't seem to tell a story without wandering off to ridicule somebody's clothes, sexual habits, or inflated sense of importance. Outrageous sexual encounters and increasingly bizarre criminal dealings are sometimes left on the back burner in favor of a cornucopia of insults. It becomes increasingly obvious that Danny, though an astute observer of everyone else, has never turned his gaze inward. And that's what makes Rent Boy so much fun: you spend 128 pages with a narrator who's the literary equivalent of the biggest gossip at the party, whose side you never want to leave for fear of missing some tea he’s about to spill.
'The Swimmers' by Julie Otsuka (2022)
There's an entire little society operating at the underground swimming pool. There's the fast-lane swimmers judging the slowpokes; there's those who count every lap religiously while others steep in the water until their problems have finally seeped out. But everyone holds their daily swim as sacred. But then it all starts to fracture, literally, when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool. The regulars morph from swimmers to amateur engineers, to fledgling conspiracy theorists, to self-appointed safety inspectors.
Julie Otsuka has the swimmers narrate the first part. They use a collective "we" that's particularly funny considering how little they agree on. But it has the effect of turning all their complaints and observations into rhythmic passages that begin to resemble the laps they're swimming. Then Otsuka focuses solely on Alice, who's suffering from dementia and for whom the pool remains one of the few places where her failing memory doesn't interfere with everyday life. The novel changes course as Alice's daughter struggles to hold on to a mother who's slowly forgetting her. And all that repetition takes on a different meaning: What initially made the swimmers' routines so entertaining becomes a painful measure of everything Alice is losing.
'The Anniversary' by Andrea Bajani (2025)
Most anniversaries are occasions for celebration. But the unnamed narrator of The Anniversary is marking 10 years since he last spoke to his parents. He calls them the happiest years of his life. The estrangement began after one of his regular visits, when his mother followed him to the stairwell and asked if he'd come back. "Of course," he told her. He then changed his phone number, moved away, and never saw either parent again. It sounds awfully cruel until Andrea Bajani starts revealing what those visits were like.
His father was intimidating and violent; his mother was so weak she seemed to disappear as a person. But Bajani doesn't give another account of an abusive father. He tries to reconstruct the woman who spent decades living in his shadow. The more we learn about her, the more complicated the narrator's decision becomes, because escaping his father also meant abandoning his mother. There's nothing in the novel suggesting the decision was right or wrong, nor does Bajani entertain the notion that family ties must always be repaired. At just 144 pages, it's a rare and unique account of what it takes to finally leave home.
Collider Exclusive · Villain Personality Quiz Which Criminal Mastermind Would Be Your Nemesis? Lecter · Joker · Moriarty · Chigurh
Four of the finest criminal minds ever put on screen. One of them would look at you and see something worth their time. Eight questions decide which one comes for you, why they picked you, and what they would want when they arrived.
🍷Lecter
🃏Joker
♟️Moriarty
🪙Chigurh
01
What would a criminal mastermind notice about you first? Great villains choose their opponents carefully. Something about you got their attention.
02
How do they make first contact? The introduction tells you everything about what is coming next.
03
What do you actually believe about right and wrong? Every nemesis is really an argument about the thing you believe most.
04
What finally gets under your skin? Everybody has a pressure point. Finding yours is the whole plan.
05
They have made their move. How do you fight back? This is the part of the film where the audience finds out who you are.
06
What would they use against you? A good villain never brings a weapon you have not already handed them.
07
What do they actually want from you? The money is never the point. Something else always is.
08
How does it end between the two of you? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who comes for you.
The Case File Is Complete Your Nemesis Is…
Four criminal masterminds. One of them was always going to be yours. Here is who comes for you, why they picked you out of everyone available, and what they want from the encounter.
Hannibal Lecter
Your nemesis does not want to beat you. He wants to know you completely, and he is patient enough to wait for it. The frightening part is how good the conversation is.
- Lecter is the most dangerous kind of opponent: the one who finds you interesting. He never raises his voice, because he has never needed to.
- You keep a great deal to yourself and you are careful about what you show. That reserve is exactly the door he would knock on.
- The films understood something other thrillers missed. The horror is not the violence. It is being perfectly understood by the wrong person.
- He would be unfailingly polite about all of it. That is the worst part.
The Joker
Your nemesis is not after money, territory or revenge. He is after a demonstration, and you are the person he has chosen to prove his point on.
- The Joker only picks opponents who believe in something. Your decency is not a defence against him. It is the entire reason he showed up.
- He has no plan you can predict and nothing you can take away, which removes every tool you would normally reach for.
- His whole argument is that you are one bad day away from being him, and you would spend the rest of your life proving him wrong.
- He would call it a magic trick. You would call it the worst night of your life.
Moriarty
Your nemesis respects you, which sounds flattering until you work out what it means. He chose you because nobody else was worth his time.
- Moriarty is the original criminal mastermind, the template every later one borrows from: a mind the equal of the hero's, pointed the wrong way.
- You enjoy being the cleverest person in the room. He is counting on exactly that, and he has already built the room.
- This is the rare nemesis who would be genuinely disappointed if you lost badly. He needs the game to be worth playing.
- It ends the way these things always end. Two people, one problem, and only one way down.
Anton Chigurh
Your nemesis has no personal interest in you whatsoever, and that is precisely what makes him unsurvivable. You are not a rival. You are a stop on the way.
- Chigurh does not negotiate, gloat or explain. He arrives, he asks one question, and the answer was decided long before you opened your mouth.
- You trust yourself to handle things. He is the one problem in the world that has no interest in how capable you are.
- No Country for Old Men rewrote the screen villain by removing the thing audiences quietly rely on: the sense that talking might work.
- Call it. He will wait.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.