3 Short but Great Books I Recommend You to Read this Winter

Hello there everybody, glad to be back again this time with three short but wonderful books you can read in just one day, two days at the most.

“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go”. - Dr. Seuss

You may know these books from movies and TV adaptations but, have you actually read them? Those numerous adaptations have failed to capture the magic of these wonderful short novels, that’s why you have to read them.

One is a beloved 19th children’s book with many movie adaptations; the next one is a psychological novella of the 1980s and the third one is the only true masterpiece of the 21st century.

So, without further ado, here we go:

3- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
by Lewis Carroll

(Via: Bookshop.org)

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Alice, sitting with her older sister at a river bank, gets bored with the book her sister is reading… but, suddenly, she sees a white rabbit who has a watch and is running late. The girl Alice starts following him until she falls in a hole, total darkness, she keeps falling. She lands on dry leaves and sees the rabbit again. She drinks something and shrinks, then she eats a cake and grows taller. She doesn’t understand what is happening and starts crying, her tears form a big pond.

She recites poetry, shrinks again and start living the strangest adventures a little English girl can only dream of living and will meet the strangest characters like that white rabbit, a caterpillar that smokes from a hookah, lots of talking animals, a Duchess and her son, a hare, a mad hatter and the infamous Cheshire Cat. She follow the advice of this cat and arrives at a kingdom where a king and a ruthless queen, with her army of cards, wants to cut the head of every one who dares to contradict her. When the Queen orders Alice’s head to be cut off, the girl starts to run, but how can she escape from the strangest of all places?

George Dunlop Leslie - Alice in Wonderland (circa 1879)
(Via: Wikipedia)

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) was an Anglican priest, a mathematician a photographer and a British writer. In 1856, he started a friendship with Henry Liddell, a Dean, and his three daughters, the youngest one, called Alice, has been cited as the inspiration of the character of the novel, although Carroll always denied this. A novel that gained little attention at first, nonetheless acquired success as the years went by, prompting Carroll to write a second part in 1871.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been described as a satire against the conventions of English education and the politics of its time. It is one of the world’s most influential novels, and even Queen Victoria was a known fan. The characters of the White Rabbit, the Dormouse, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen of Hearts have become part of our mythology and are not going to go away. Like many of you here, I discovered this story from the 1951 Disney movie and since then hasn’t stopped confusing my imagination. So, if you haven’t read this one give it a chance, since you are now an adult and the book is full of symbolisms you may or may not understand what all the fuss has been about for over one hundred years.

2- The Pigeon (1987)
By Patrick Süskind

A French cover of The Pigeon
(Via: sauramps.com)

“...he came to the conclusion that you cannot depend on people, and that you can live in peace only if you keep them at arm's length.”
― The Pigeon

Jonathan Noel, a fastidious security guard who works at a Parisian bank, prepares to leave his tiny apartment punctually, like every day of the week. At the age of fifty, he has lived a quiet life without any mayor incidents during the last twenty years. He served in the war of Indochina, was wounded, returned to France to get married, only to have his wife betrayed him and running away with a Tunisian fruit seller. Jonathan concluded he could not trust any human being so he preferred to get away from them as much as he could. He got a job at the bank, rented a small but comfortable apartment (which he calls his “mistress”), paid his bills on time and was just waiting for his retirement. Life went on quietly, until that morning when he sees a diabolical animal outside his apartment, a pigeon. He thinks the small pigeon will bring others and with their coo and their shit will ruin the building. The man is scared to return to the building and what’s going to happen to him?

A street of Paris (Via: Pixabay)

The incident of a pigeon in an aisle of the building where the protagonist lives will grow in mayor proportions, but only in his own mind. The somewhat Kafkaesque novella reveals a moral metaphor of the human existence in its short 126 pages and has been compared to Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven. A small pigeon ruins the life of a quiet man, but is it really doing that? Why is this man catastrophizing about a small bird? This is one of the few books Süskind wrote after taking the world by storm in 1985 with the extraordinary Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. I have read The Pigeon three times already and plan to read it again; it’s a book with an excellent narrative, one of the best novels ever written that takes place in a 24 hours period and a book you can finish in a day. Too bad Süskind never wrote other works of fiction; he lives quietly as a recluse in a little town in Germany.

1- The Road (2006)
by Cormac McCarthy

A book cover of The Road (Via: Goodreads.com)

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.” – The Road

A man and his son wander round in a bleak, cold post-apocalyptic new world. They carry their few belongings in a supermarket trolley and their only protection is a gun with just two bullets. They wander because they haven’t seen a soul in many months, always hungry and tired. In their hunt for food they encounter bad people and terrifying places. In this new world cannibalism has become a way of living and there are groups of people who hunt for other people to eat their parts. The man and the boy barely escape a horrific scene inside a house; other times they’re lucky and are able to find food and other materials. Their only hope is to keep walking until they can find the group of the good guys, but will they find them?

A desolated world. (Via: pixabay)

Cormac McCarthy, born in 1933, is one of the best writers alive. His strong, visceral and sometimes poetic prose has penned extraordinary novels such as Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men; he has won the prestigious National Book Award for Fiction in 1992 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road in 2007. The Road is, as far as I’m concerned, the best novel of this 21st century; so far nobody has written anything better than this one. It is also one of the best novels ever written about a father and son relationship, somewhat similar to another excellent novel, that is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, published in 1974. There was a movie adaptation of The Road released in 2009 starring Viggo Mortensen as the Man. McCarthy spent sixteen years without publishing another novel until The Passenger, released in 2022. He has been criticized for his lack of precise descriptions in his novels. The Road is the story of a father trying to raise his son in a new horrible world that provides nothing for them. It is one of the greatest works of universal literature.

(Image of the beginning via Pixabay)

So, what do you think? Have you read any of these wonderful novels? Do you have another recommendation you would like to add? Well, leave it in the comment section right now.

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Culture makes you free!

Until next time.

Take care.

Orlando.