Now, just to be clear, I think every day is ‘read a book day’ BUT, in case – for whatever reason – you only pick up a book once every 365 days or so here’s a few reasonably sized books. You can devour any one of them in 24 hours (with room to spare!)

Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon

I didn’t love it but I read it damn quick – try it one day and see what you think…

Maddy is allergic to the world; stepping outside the sterile sanctuary of her home could kill her. But then Olly moves in next door. And just like that, Maddy realizes there’s more to life than just being alive. You only get one chance at first love. And Maddy is ready to risk everything, everything to see where it leads.

‘Powerful, lovely, heart-wrenching, and so absorbing I devoured it in one sitting’ – Jennifer Niven, author of All the Bright Places

Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo

This one I did love, it’s a children’s book about a shipwrecked boy. It entranced me as a child and it has the same effect now – a quick read but incredibly heartwarming.

I disappeared on the night before my twelfth birthday.

Gorgeous new colour illustrations for the best-selling Kensuke’s Kingdom. Washed up on an island in the Pacific, Michael struggles to survive on his own. With no food and no water, he curls up to die. When he wakes, there is a plate beside him of fish, of fruit, and a bowl of fresh water. He is not alone .

Kensuke’s Kingdom is a gripping adventure from the author of War Horse. Michael Morpurgo has written more than one hundred books for children and won the Whitbread Award, the Smarties Award, the Circle of Gold Award, the Children’s Book Award and has been short-listed for the Carnegie Medal four times.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

This is one of my all time favourite books (both independently and within the context of the film it inspired). So slight you might call it a novella, if you haven’t read it already it really wouldn’t take up much room on your tbr.

It’s New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail hour till breakfast at Tiffany’s. And nice girls don’t, except, of course, for Holly Golightly: glittering socialite traveller, generally upwards, sometimes sideways and once in a while – down. Pursued by to Salvatore ‘Sally’ Tomato, the Mafia sugar-daddy doing life in Sing Sing and ‘Rusty’ Trawler, the blue-chinned, cuff-shooting millionaire man about women about town, Holly is a fragile eyeful of tawny hair and turned-up nose, a heart-breaker, a perplexer, a traveller, a tease. She is irrepressibly ‘top banana in the shock deparment’, and one of the shining flowers of American fiction.

The Ocean at The End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman

Slightly longer than a few on the list so far but so utterly delicious you’ll devour it in no time at all. Gaiman delivers subtle magic that packs a poignant punch. The Ocean at the End of The Lane left me dazed.

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond this world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed – within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it.

His only defence is three women, on a farm at the end of the lane. The youngest of them claims that her duckpond is an ocean. The oldest can remember the Big Bang

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

If you’re looking for something a little more eerie (I mean October is only a month away) or unsettling The Ice Palace is the perfect tiny book to break your heart. It traps you in a terrible dream and spits you out cold.

‘She was close to the edge now: the ice laid its hand upon her’

The schoolchildren call it the Ice Palace: a frozen waterfall in the Norwegian fjords transformed into a fantastic structure of translucent walls, sparkling towers and secret chambers. It fascinates two young girls, lonely Unn and lively Siss, who strike up an intense friendship. When Unn decides to explore the Ice Palace alone and doesn’t return, Siss must try to cope with the loss of her friend without succumbing to a frozen world of her own making.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian is similar in its strange and fascinating nature. A bizarre and compelling tale. Completely unsettling. Obviously I loved it!

Yeong-hye and her husband are ordinary people. He is an office worker with moderate ambitions and mild manners; she is an uninspired but dutiful wife. The acceptable flatline of their marriage is interrupted when Yeong-hye, seeking a more ‘plant-like’ existence, decides to become a vegetarian, prompted by grotesque recurring nightmares. In South Korea, where vegetarianism is almost unheard-of and societal mores are strictly obeyed, Yeong-hye’s decision is a shocking act of subversion. Her passive rebellion manifests in ever more bizarre and frightening forms, leading her bland husband to self-justified acts of sexual sadism. His cruelties drive her towards attempted suicide and hospitalisation. She unknowingly captivates her sister’s husband, a video artist. She becomes the focus of his increasingly erotic and unhinged artworks, while spiralling further and further into her fantasies of abandoning her fleshly prison and becoming – impossibly, ecstatically – a tree. Fraught, disturbing and beautiful, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby is a classic that can’t possibly be missed off this list. It’s not a long book but it’s a struggle for Gatsby (though his style will always seem effortless).

Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the “roaring twenties”, and a devastating expose of the “Jazz Age”.

Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick’s cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If you’ve studied Literature in any way you’ve probably read Charlotte Perkin’s Gillman’s short story and can recite the hundreds of ways it highlights the feminist issues of its time. If you haven’t read it, it’s incredible ON SO MANY LEVELS. It’s one of those you can read 5 times and find something new each time – thankfully it’s a good length to make this entirely doable.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman – is a much celebrated and classic tale by one of the worlds most loved authors.

This work is considered an important early work in feminist literature and one which explored issues about women’s health, both physical and mental.  

Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman whose physician husband (John) has rented an old mansion for the summer. She is housed in the attic, a room with a curious wallpaper through which a number of issues are explored.

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

It’s a slim book but this is a memoir of unreal proportions. You could probably read it in a day but you might need more time than that to appreciate it.

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles.
A clear-sighted, unflinching work that provokes questions about our definitions of sane and insane, Kaysen’s extraordinary memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.

That’s it for today’s list – I’ve only looked at books I’ve already read but I’m always keen to discover more. Let me know which shorter books you’d have on your ‘read in a day’ list in the comments.

Summaries and images sourced from amazon.co.uk