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Approximate Reading Times
Quick Read: under 5 minutes
Short Story: 5 to 30 minutes
Novelette: 30 to 90 minutes
Novella: 1.5 to 2.5 hours
Novelette by Daniel Keyes. A touching short story about a mentally handicapped man who undergoes experimental surgery to enhance his intelligence. The operation’s initial success highlights an interesting aspect of intelligence: the very gifted can be as out of touch with reality and friendless as the intellectually challenged.
Short Story by Ruskin Bond. A tragic story of man so frightfully disfigured by war that he is afraid to leave his room by day, and confines himself to creeping phantom-like around an aging hotel by night. His two loves in life: his books and music.
Short Story by Katherine Porter. A poor farm family are forced to institutionalize their ailing special needs son. The story questions whether his mother’s tears are the result of losing him, a sense of failure/shame as a mother, and/or (as the narrator cruelly suggests) wishing he had never been born.
Grade 5-6 Story by Alma Luz Villanueva. Set in the future, Earth has warmed so much that direct exposure to sunlight or seawater can be deadly. A woman persists in taking her grandchildren on monthly excursions to the beach. This time they are going to build their first sand castle.
Short Story by Jhumpa Lahiri. A conservative, up-and-coming corporate engineer marries a free-spirited, scatty woman. They have known each other for only four months, and both are used to getting their own way. A battle of wills arises over items left by the former occupants of their new house.
Quick Read by Khushwant Singh. A moving tribute to the author’s grandmother. He recalls their close friendship during his early schooling, the “turning point” when they moved to live with his parents in the city, and their growing estrangement as Western influences and higher education demands came between them.