I read every day – the 3 best books under 300 pages for reading slumps | Books | Entertainment

We’re halfway into the year now and if you are the kind of person who sets New Year’s resolutions, perhaps reading more was on your list. Like so many people who set these resolutions, perhaps you’ve fallen a little short of your original goal but that doesn’t mean you need to give up completely.

You don’t need to read massive essays or try to tackle War and Peace. Instead, you can just try a few pages every day of a short novel and see how easy it is to get yourself out of a slump. Personally, I read every day and have for years – but that doesn’t mean I’m paging the classics.

I read a lot of literary fiction, and some of my favourites are under 300 pages. This makes them perfect for reading in a short amount of time, and they can pull you out of your slump with ease.

Beartooth – Callan Wink

This 241 page novel tells the story of brothers Thad and Hazen who live just above the poverty line in the Montana mountains outside Yellowstone National Park. Struggling to make ends meet after the death of their father the brothers find themselves enmeshed in a shady hunting deal that on the face of it could solve all their problems – but of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Beartooth is a stunning and sensory novel, where each page unfurls a rich new landscape. The brothers’ relationship is fraught, and the writing is beautiful – the way Callan describes Yellowstone and its surroundings truly feel like the forest is around you.

If you’ve been struggling to get out of a reading slump, Beartooth is a great place to start.

The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson

The Netflix reimagination of this classic horror novel has a run time of nine hours and 36 minutes – but the novel can be read in an afternoon. It’s 246 pages long and a masterclass in psychological tension which can be read from the first three sentences. The novel centres on an academic experiment to determine whether Hill House really is haunted. Lonely Eleanor, artistic medium Theodora and the heir of the home Luke are invited by Dr John Montague to find out what the walls of this old stately home are concealing.

The novel opens with a literary establishing shot the likes of which I’ve never seen.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.

“Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

From this opening, you know that horror awaits.

Fear lives in every corner of Hill House, and the same fear grips the reader at every page. I could not put this book down, try as I might.

Wild Dark Shore – Charlotte McConaghy

On the shores of an abandoned island that is being reclaimed by the sea, a strange woman washes up. She is taken in by the caretaker of the island Dominic and his three children as they prepare to evacuate – but before they go, they must choose what the future of humanity will be able to regrow if the climate crisis takes further hold.

Dominic and his children are the final caretakers of the world’s largest seedbank which is slowly flooding and as they try to figure out who this strange woman is, she in turn, is trying to understand them. The writing is as intense as the setting, and like Beartooth, it really recreates the natural landscape in a way that transports the reader to the ends of the earth.

The longest of the three, Wild Dark Shore comes in at 300 pages exactly but it feels much shorter. I loved this book so much I had to ration myself on it, because I dreaded finishing it.