True bookworms know there is a strange wonder in finishing a book in a single sitting – complete immersion and (hopefully) no distractions. Or those wonderful weekends when you start a book on Saturday and finish it by Sunday. Yet, not all books allow this. Some are too long, others are too heavy. So welcome, to the sweet spot.
Here is a list of 15 books that you can easily read in a single sitting, or within a single day.
1. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
A groundbreaking work from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes us human and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out. It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly’s wing and as menacing as a knife in the dark.
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2. The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
The #1 New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist from the bestselling author of Everything, Everything will have you falling in love with Natasha and Daniel as they fall in love with each other!
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3. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
In Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher tells the true and intoxicating story of her life with inimitable wit. It’s an incredible tale – from having Elizabeth Taylor as a stepmother, to marrying (and divorcing) Paul Simon, from having the father of her daughter leave her for a man, to ultimately waking up one morning and finding a friend dead beside her in bed.
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4. milk and honey by Rupi Kaur
milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity. It is split into four chapters, and each chapter serves a different purpose, deals with a different pain, heals a different heartache. milk and honey takes readers through a journey of the most bitter moments in life and finds sweetness in them because there is sweetness everywhere if you are just willing to look.
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5. Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley
The magic of this novel is in the read, and we don’t want to spoil it by giving away too many details. We can tell you that this is a story about that special someone: the one you trust, the one you can’t live without.
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6. Room by Emma Donoghue
Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.
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7. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
While you wait for your morning coffee to brew, for the bus, the train, or a plane to arrive, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry will reveal just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics, and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.
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8. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The compelling story of two outsiders striving to find their place in an unforgiving world. Tackling universal themes such as the friendship of a shared vision, and giving voice to America’s lonely and dispossessed, Of Mice and Men has proved one of Steinbeck’s most popular works, achieving success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.
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9. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
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10. My Brief History by Stephen Hawking
Writing with characteristic humility and humor, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS at age twenty-one. Tracing his development as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece A Brief History of Time — one of the iconic books of the twentieth century.
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11. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd – whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself – Patrick Ness has spun a haunting and darkly funny novel of mischief, loss, and monsters both real and imagined.
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12. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.
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13. Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world.
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15. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky, Perks follows observant “wallflower” Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.
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Which book(s) did you finish in a single sitting?
Books Rock My World 
I’ve read A Monster Calls, Room, and Of Mice and Men, and I totally agree they’re books you can finish in one sitting. They’re easy, but extremely compelling!
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Yes, extremely. And it is always so impressive when authors manage to write so powerfully in such a concise book.
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I agree!
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Of all these I only read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and I finished it in one night. Read it again in hebrew a year later, finished even quicker. Definitely a must for high school kids and adults too
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I would agree. It’s such a valuable book!
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I love this list and may have to revisit for recommendations soon. I have read the perks of being a wallflower and milk and honey in a short time. I liked them both.
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oh, both are so good! We hope you revisit!
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I read The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys(1890-1979) twice in two successive days. It turned my idea of what fiction could be on its head. It was inspired by Rochester’s wife in Jane Eyre and the tales Rhys heard when she first arrived in England, from Dominica, of 19th century heiresses from the West Indies married to impecunious Englishmen who couldn’t cope with the weather and the straight-jacket of English social mores at that time. A brilliant book.
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I miss one of my favorite books: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennet, just around 170 pages, but all of them brilliant!
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