Reading Great SHORT Things!

Start 2021 and the Read Great Things 2021 Challenge off right and mark your short book off the list. 

What counts as a short book? Good question. For people who read 900 page books, a 500 pager is going to be a brief adventure, right? We're willing to be flexible with the definition of "short," but in general if you want some guidelines, aim for 250 pages or fewer or about 6 hours or shorter for an audiobook.

But wait! What if the audiobook of a short book is longer than 6 hours? Does that count? Sure. For example, Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy (a beautiful book, and available through ILL) is about 250 pages in print and about 8 hours as an audiobook. Does it count if you read it as an audiobook? Sure. (Why not? If you're going to go to the work of cross referencing page number vs. audio time, we can respect that.) 

Do novellas count? It's a book, so it counts! Have we told you about Murderbot? (Answer: Yes we have and we will over and over again. It also takes place in space-- another category!) I'm also loving Nghi Vo's The Singing Hills Cycle novellas, likely available through your local public library's Overdrive/Libby collection.

Without further ado, let's get to the list of short books in a variety of subject areas.

I'd also like to remind you of the wonderful A Very Short Introduction series where, in under 150 pages, you can learn about ethics, demography, sociology, modern architecture, fairy tales, law, film noir, among the 156 books we have across our three campuses. 

Want to check one of these books out? You can either request it yourself through the catalog or contact us and we can grab it for you and schedule a time for you to come get it.

Happy (brief) reading! And remember that any of these books fit into our favorite category-- A book suggested by a Durham Tech Library staff member or on the Library blog!