18 Books for People Who Don't Like Reading (Short and Fast)

Sudha Murty spent years travelling through some of the poorest districts in India for the Infosys Foundation, and this book collects what she found there. Each piece runs two or three pages: a man who lies about his mother, a village that surprises her, a wealthy family behaving badly, a poor one that does not. She writes in the plainest English of anyone on this page, with no ornament at all, and that is exactly why it works as a first book. You are never lost, and you are never asked to hold six characters in your head at once. You finish a story, you feel something, and you can stop or keep going.

Malgudi is an invented town in South India, and Narayan wrote about it for most of his working life. These stories are tiny: a postman who will not deliver bad news, an astrologer with a past, a man who wins a road engine in a lottery and then cannot get rid of it. Nothing enormous happens in most of them, and that is the pleasure of the thing. Narayan writes with almost no decoration, so the sentences disappear and you are simply watching people. Plenty of Indians know all this from the old Doordarshan series and have never opened the book, which is a strange thing to be missing out on.

This is the collection that made Holmes famous, and it is still the most efficient entertainment written in English. A client turns up at Baker Street with a situation that makes no sense, Holmes notices four things nobody else noticed, and twenty pages later you have your explanation. A Scandal in Bohemia, The Red-Headed League, The Speckled Band. The Victorian English takes a page or two to settle into and then stops being a barrier at all. The best part for a nervous reader is the shape of it: read one story tonight and the next one in a month, and you lose nothing in between.

It runs under a hundred and fifty pages in the simplest English Orwell could manage, because he wanted it read by people who did not read. The animals of Manor Farm drive out the farmer and take over on the principle that all animals are equal. Then the pigs quietly start keeping the milk for themselves. What follows is a political argument in the shape of a fable, and it is genuinely funny for a long while before it turns cold on you. You need to know nothing about Russian history to follow it. Knowing some makes it better, and that can wait for a second read.

Santiago keeps having the same dream about treasure at the pyramids, so he sells his sheep and starts walking. On the road he meets a king, a crystal merchant, an Englishman studying alchemy, and a woman at an oasis, and every one of them tells him something about following what he actually wants. The story is simple by design, closer to a fable than a novel, and it moves quickly. Whether the philosophy lands depends almost entirely on your age and your mood. At nineteen it can feel like somebody handing you a map. At thirty-five it can feel like a poster in a dentist's waiting room.

Stanley Yelnats is convicted of a theft he did not commit and sent to Camp Green Lake, which has neither a lake nor anything green. Every boy there digs a hole five feet deep and five feet across, every day, in the sun. The warden says it builds character. It obviously does not, and the question of what they are really looking for pulls you straight through the book. Sachar runs three separate timelines and braids them so neatly that the ending clicks shut like a lock. It is sold as a children's book and it is better constructed than most novels sold to adults.

August Pullman was born with a facial difference and has been schooled at home his whole life. At ten he starts fifth grade at a regular school, and the book follows what that costs him and what it costs the people near him. The structure is the trick. It keeps switching narrators, so you get his sister, his classmates, the friend who betrays him, each in a short section with a voice of its own. Chapters run two or three pages. It was written for children and it will still get you, which is a slightly embarrassing thing to discover on a crowded train.

Christopher Boone finds a dog dead on a lawn, decides to work out who did it, and writes the book you are holding as his investigation report. He notices everything and understands very little of what adults actually mean, so you keep assembling the real story a page or two ahead of him. The chapters are numbered in primes, there are diagrams and maps and lists all through it, and the whole thing reads like nothing else on your shelf. The dead dog turns out to be the smaller story. What is happening inside that house is much bigger, and it arrives very quietly.

In a future North America, every district sends two children a year to fight to the death on national television, and Katniss Everdeen volunteers so that her younger sister does not have to. The first section is the selection and the training, the second is the arena. Collins writes in first person, present tense, short chapters, and she ends almost every one of them mid-danger, which is manipulative and completely effective. There is a reason people who insist they cannot finish books finish this one in two days. The politics underneath it is also sharper than the films let on.

Mark Watney gets stranded when his crew evacuates in a storm and assumes he is dead. He has a habitat, some potatoes, a great deal of duct tape and a log file, and the book is largely him working problems in order: water, air, food, power, distance. Weir writes those log entries as a stand-up routine, so a novel full of chemistry is also a novel full of jokes. If you have ever assumed that science and fun are separate categories, this fixes the assumption inside forty pages. The film is good and it left out most of the best material.

Alicia Berenson is found beside her husband's body and says nothing, not at the arrest, not at the trial, not for six years inside a secure hospital. Theo Faber takes a job at that hospital specifically to get her talking. The chapters are short, the writing is plain, and the whole book is engineered around a single reveal that most readers do not see coming. It is not deep, and it is not trying to be. It is built like a trap, and as an experience of being pulled through three hundred pages by pure curiosity, it does the job perfectly.

Amy Dunne vanishes from the house she shares with Nick in a dying Missouri town, and the police, the neighbours and eventually a television audience all begin arranging their faces at Nick. Flynn alternates his account with Amy's diary, and the two versions of the same marriage do not match anywhere. This is a nastier and far better written book than most thrillers, with a real argument inside it about the performances people put on for each other inside a relationship. It is longer than anything before it here, and the halfway mark is where it changes shape entirely.

Amir is the son of a wealthy man in 1970s Kabul. Hassan is the servant's son, and the two are inseparable until an afternoon at a kite-fighting tournament when Amir stands still while something terrible happens. The rest of the novel is what that costs, across the Soviet invasion, an escape to America and eventually a return. Hosseini writes in clean, unfussy sentences and builds the whole thing on guilt, which is an engine that never once stalls. It is the heaviest book on this page emotionally, and also the one people most often finish across a single weekend.

Hari, Ryan and Alok arrive at IIT Delhi as the brightest students their schools ever produced and slide promptly to the bottom of the class. The book is about that slide: the GPA, the parents, the hostel nights, a professor's daughter, and a plan that goes very badly wrong. Bhagat writes in short chapters and flat, functional English, and for this particular reader that is the feature rather than the flaw. It arrived in 2004 and pulled a whole generation of Indian non-readers into bookshops, largely because it was the first novel many of them had seen that sounded like their own hostel corridor.

The premise is the hook. What if Shiva was a man first, a tribal leader from near Mansarovar, and the god came afterwards. Amish drops him into Meluha, a hyper-organised Indus Valley kingdom with a rule for everything, where the locals decide that his blue throat marks him as the Neelkanth they have been waiting for. The plot is a straightforward quest with a war and a romance inside it, and the writing is functional at best. What carries the book is the idea, plus the pleasure of meeting mythology you grew up with laid out as a political thriller.

Kalam wrote this with Arun Tiwari, and it runs from a small house in Rameswaram to the rocket and missile programmes at ISRO and DRDO. He is oddly humble about the whole thing. Failures get as much room as launches, and the teachers and colleagues who shaped him get considerably more room than he gives himself. The English is simple and a little old-fashioned, the chapters are short, and the book runs to about two hundred pages. If somebody in your house refuses fiction on principle, this is usually the one that gets past the door.

Héctor García and Francesc Miralles went to Ogimi in Okinawa, a village known for how long its people live, and asked them what keeps them going. The book braids those conversations with Japanese ideas about purpose, some diet, some movement, some notes on flow. It is small, the chapters are short, and there is a lot of white space on every page. Treat it as a pleasant conversation rather than a research paper, because the science in it is thin and the appeal is really the tone: unhurried, kind, and clear that a small reason to get up in the morning is enough.

Clear's argument is that goals matter far less than the systems you fall back on when you are tired, and the book is a long, practical working out of that idea: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Every chapter is short, every idea comes with an example and something to try, and each one ends with a summary. It is the least literary book on this page and by a distance the most immediately usable. You can read it in twenty-minute pieces on a commute and still come away with the whole thing.