Over at In Athens, Matt is asking for book nominations. Specifically, he "want[s] to start a discussion about little books with big impact." He elaborates, "Sometimes I judge a book by its cover. Mostly I judge it by its size. Little books seem sissy to me. This is ironic since I am not large in stature myself."
As I'm not a very tall guy either, I kind of relate. Although I definitely have bigger guns than Matt. But I agree that height, or thickness, in this case, is not a good judge of power. So here are some of my picks. Feel free to submit some yourself; the only condition is that the books must be less than 150 pages.
The Books Themselves
111 pages. Rampantly creative and off-the-charts true (if that's possible). Read it in a day and spend the next year writing a novel.
84 pages. For those allergic to full length masterpieces, Piper distills Christian hedonism down to its basic elements.
94 pages. A thoughtful contrast between Buddhism and Christianity, presented in profound, narrative form.
159 pages. I realize I'm shoehorning this one in, but at this length you can afford to read and reread the book until you master its topic. Took me about three times through.
48 pages. Awesome book, makes you want to dig holes.
And I could go on... but maybe you'd like to jump in?
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Great Little Books
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3 comments:
My first thought was "The Little Prince," by Antoine de Saint Exupery. I read it on the bus ride home when we were given it in eighth grade, and I've loved it ever since.
By the way, how do you make those Amazon links show all of that extra stuff? I'm jealous.
I give a thumbs up to A Hole To Dig, and The Writing Life.
I would add... Good Goats by Linn, Linn, and Linn.
The Little Prince is a great book. I'll have to look up Good Goats. Or maybe Aidan has already read that one.
The Amazon links...you can get a code snippet from their Associates page to get the extra pop-ups.
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