The long-underrated SHORT book has a lot to offer. Let’s start with the prose: If you’re going to read through multiple volumes, it’s smart to keep it short. Slim books can be slipped into a bag or coat pocket and pulled out in a spare moment, making you more likely to finish them. For adventurous readers, the format allows for casual experimentation with new styles, themes, and authors. For indecisive readers, it can make a bookstore’s universe of possibilities seem less daunting: just search the shelves for slim spines. Above all, there’s a rare satisfaction in reaching the final pages of a book while still having the entire story in your head. Tight prose is intense and haunting, like a distilled perfume. These books offer that, too. They have to; they don’t have much time to make their point. In an age of distractions, that’s a great virtue.

These six nonfiction books include memoirs, journalism, essays and coffee table books. They take you into the bedroom of a grieving husband in imperial China, into the courtroom where a high-profile murder trial divided the Jewish community of Bukhara in New York in the late 2000s, and, in classic style, into a room of your own. In short, they pack a lot into just 150 pages.

Six Records of a Floating Life. By Shen Fu. Translated by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui. Penguin Classics; 144 pages; $16 and £9.99

A meditation on extraordinary love and ordinary life, this memoir was written by a widowed scholar in early 19th-century Qing dynasty China. Despite the passage of time, Shen Fu’s joys and sorrows seem comfortingly familiar. He was an official who, though highly educated for his time, failed to rise in the hierarchy. He quarreled with his parents, played drinking games, and went on picnics. He also married the love of his life (they had known each other since they were 13) and, as Shen’s memoir shows, he treated Chen Yun as an equal, admiring her practical disposition and engaging in impromptu poetry contests with her. The book has long been valued in China as a truthful account of deep love. Even for modern readers, the records may hold some surprises. Shen loved to arrange flowers. And although he and Yun adored each other, she naturally sought out a concubine for him – with whom, as the text suggests, she also had sex (lesbian relationships were not particularly frowned upon at the time). The translators’ thoughtful footnotes make the reading even more enjoyable.

Oranges. By John McPhee. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 149 pp.; $16. Daunt; £9.99

Can you write 150 brilliant pages about the everyday orange? John McPhee proves that you can. “Oranges,” which grew out of a 1966 essay in The New Yorker, launched a new form of journalism: one that combined whimsy with forensic, explanatory reporting. Mr. McPhee examines the post-World War II rise of frozen orange juice concentrate — already a $700 million industry and “the biggest boom since the Brazilian rubber boom.” He interviews Florida’s orange barons, pickers, packers and pomologists. His essay ranges from the fantastical sex life of oranges to the Sanskrit roots of the word (naranga) to the role of oranges in the Norman invasion of Sicily. It’s sweet to read about Botticelli and degrees Brix (the standard measure of sugar) in one sitting. This is also analysis at its sharpest, and eating an orange will never be the same again.

A Room of One’s Own. By Virginia Woolf. Mariner; 128 pages; $16.99. Penguin Modern Classics; £5.99

One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, A Room of One’s Own is based on a lecture Virginia Woolf gave at Newnham College and Girton College, the first two for women at Cambridge University. Woolf’s most famous line comes on the second page: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write novels.” This leads her to new avenues of questioning. As she describes the thoughts that come to her while walking through “Oxbridge” (a barely fictional mix) and London, her dry humor develops a ferocity that builds to anger. “Why are women poor?” she asks. “What effect does poverty have on novels?” And “What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?” To find the answers, she draws on the works of women across the centuries, from Aphra Behn to the Brontë sisters. The lot of women in Britain has improved dramatically in the century since Woolf wrote her essay. Nevertheless, it appears to be essential reading, especially as a manifesto for the right to form one’s own opinion and to express it.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial. By Janet Malcolm. Yale University Press; 155 pages; $13.95 and £9.99

If the goal of journalistic investigation is to provide answers, Janet Malcolm shows with chilling accuracy that observation can be enough. Iphigenia in Forest Hills tells the story of a murder trial in New York in 2009. Mazoltuv Borukhova, a 35-year-old doctor, is accused of paying an acquaintance to kill her husband. Malcolm lays out the facts of the case and then raises the question at the heart of most true crime stories: “She couldn’t have done it, and she must have.” But the title, a reference to the Greek myth of Iphigenia, Agamemnon’s sacrificed daughter, says it all. This film, too, is a tragedy; its ending is certain. Malcolm offers no suspense. Instead, she elicits larger, more troubling questions from many small procedural details in Queens Supreme Court. Like: Is bias inevitable? “Borukhova’s otherness was her defining characteristic,” Malcolm observes. Watch, her text urges, how decisive an expert’s opinion can be. Watch the seduction of certainty – how courtrooms revel in it. Watch the little tyrannies the judge allows himself. Malcolm subtly puts her point: a trial may be nothing more than “a contest between competing narratives.”

Ways of Seeing. By John Berger. Penguin Modern Classics; 155 pages; $11 and £9.99

John Berger’s book, based on a four-part 1972 BBC television series of the same name, is likely to change your mind about art. Four essays deal with the reproduction of art, the female form and the male gaze, the influence of ownership on art, and publicity and the illusion of authority. These are beautifully complemented by three wordless image essays, bold visual arguments for Berger’s evocative opening – which deliberately appears right on the cover of this edition – that “seeing comes before words”. He shows how the meaning of art is always influenced by how and where it is viewed. Berger’s book is also, of course, a product of its time: Marxist, radical and preoccupied with the ruling class. But it made complex ideas about a closed world accessible and engaging. Its influence is lasting: read the review we wrote for the 50th anniversary.

A Man’s Place. By Annie Ernaux. Translated by Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories Press; 96 pages; $13.95. Fitzcarraldo Editions; £7.99

Annie Ernaux has made a name for herself with autobiographical novels in which, as we wrote at the award ceremony for the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, she “transforms the private and the everyday into something profound”. But to write a radically short biography of her father, the French author had to abandon all pretense; she gave up a first attempt at a novel with “feelings of disgust”. “If I want to tell the story of a life determined by necessity,” she writes, “I have no right to choose an artistic approach.” The result is a sparse memoir marked by pure beauty. Her deliberate restraint, almost ethnographic, is the work of a daughter trying to do justice to the life of a father she could no longer really know: “Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like a broken love.” Like many others of his time, he first worked on a farm, then went into a factory and finally worked for himself, as a shopkeeper in rural Normandy. Ms. Ernaux strove, she writes, to convey both his happiness and “the humiliating limitations” of his class. It is the story of a generation, but also clearly that of her father.

Try also

Mrs. Ernaux wrote a short biography of her mother entitled “The Story of a Woman.” This was as successful as the one about her father and secured her reputation among French readers.

If you enjoyed Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills, you might also like Still Pictures, a short book published posthumously that is perhaps her most personal. We reviewed it last year.

Not familiar with John McPhee’s work? He has written more than 30 books. After Oranges, you can also try his latest work, Tabula Rasa – it’s under 200 pages. We’ve given our verdict. If you’re looking for novels to read in a day, here are six to get you started.

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