What happens next is all @wovenstrap's fault. He suggested I do a list of 30 short but great books that can each be read in a day for someone in isolation/quarantine. So here we go!

1. THE DUEL: Joseph Conrad: genuinely funny novella about a Napoleonic officer being stalked over a period of years by a madman determined to fight a duel

2. CONFESSIONS OF A LAPSED STANDARD-BEARER: Andreï Makine: maybe his most Chekhovian book, about Alyosha and Arkady, Young Pioneers in post-WW2 Leningrad; an oddly sweet book about terrible disillusionment

3. THE TWENTY DAYS OF TURIN: Giorgio De Maria: a political library of personal diaries inadvertently leads to a plague of mass psychosis and death; uneasy plague reading

more (less blokey) books tomorrow

4. THE GIRLS OF SLENDER MEANS: Muriel Spark: pretty much any book by Spark would fit this list, but this might be my favourite; the erotic/emotional hothouse of a girl's boarding house during the Blitz with an unexploded bomb on the premises

5. CASTLE RACKRENT: Maria Edgeworth: another black comedy with duelling in it, plus obsession, intra-marriage warfare, politics and endless bad behaviour; the first Irish Big House saga, and it's only 90 pages

6. I HAVE WAITED, AND YOU HAVE COME: Martine McDonagh: a woman's life in sodden, semi-ruined post-Climate-Change England is disrupted by a man who has fixated on her; subtle, vivid and beautifully written

7. THESE POSSIBLE LIVES: Fleur Jaeggy: Three short essays about the lives of three writers, making up an absolutely brilliant tiny book which loops through absurdities and weirdnesses, history and art. Fascinating and amazing.

8. JOAN SMOKES: Angela Meyer: a woman on the run from her past arrives in 1960s Las Vegas and reinvents herself in this noirish, fragmented novella

9. THE HOLE: José Revueltas: one of the most intense little books you'll ever read, positively humming with malignant energy; three Mexican prisoners scheme to bring drugs into their prison, and everything goes wrong

10. A JOURNEY AROUND MY ROOM: Xavier de Maistre; perfect isolation reading; XdM was put under house arrest after a duel (DUELS AGAIN!) in 1790, so he wrote a travel book for the room he was trapped in--like a proto-proust doing stand-up

11. WHITE: Marie Darrieussecq: how about a tentative romance at a near-future Antarctic research base watched over by the ghosts of the many polar dead?

12. THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?: Horace McCoy: the best noir novella about death and non-stop dancing ever written

13. THE LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIET FREAN: May Sinclair: near-perfect unhappy short novel of self-destruction via doing the expected thing. Sinclair's only novel, though she was also a dab hand at ghost stories.

14. THE CROQUET PLAYER: H G Wells: speaking of ghosts... if they're the product of violence, what about all the blood shed by Neanderthals and other pre-modern humans as they struggled to the top of the evolutionary ladder? Unusual and little-known Wells, but still very much it.

15. UPSTAGED: Jacques Jouet: a famous actor is captured, bound, gagged and stripped by his doppelgänger, who takes the stage in his place and begins to drag the world into chaos. Oulipian fun.

THIS LIST WILL CONTINUE IMMINENTLY

16. THE BEAUTIFUL SUMMER: Cesare Pavese: 1930s Italy, intense female friendship, first love affairs, discovering art and independence: get hooked on this, then move on to @nyrbclassics's 'Selected Works' for four more brilliant novellas

17. THE ALOE: Katherine Mansfield: a rare longer work by one of the greatest short story writers in lit history, an early but quite different take on what would become her 'Prelude': a captured moment of time in a NZ family's life circa 1900: magical, frankly

18. COMMONPLACE: Christina Rossetti: rare fiction from the great poet--three sisters tackle love, duty, marriage and independence in very different ways after the death of their parents. Online at https://archive.org/details/cu31924073798906

19. WERTHER NIELAND: Gerard Reve: (published with another novella as 'Childhood') -- enjoy the company of an 11yo mystic and probable psychopath as he forces his 'friends' to join him in a series of dangerous and esoteric clubs in occupied Amsterdam

20. MY MORTAL ENEMY: Willa Cather: as a child and then an adult, Nellie is obsessed with the life and loves of an older woman from her home town; she encounters and re-encounters her throughout her life

21. KILLING AUNTIE: Andrzej Bursa: you're young, you're bored, you murder your aunt, you dismember the body, you try to get rid of it, you meet a girl, you fall in love... we've all been there. Posthumously discovered blacker-than-black stuff from 1950s Poland.

22. TODDLER ON THE RUN: Shena Mackay: Morris, a grpwn man less than 4' tall, is on the run from the law and hiding out in a beach hut, besets by donkeys, beachside evangelists and British holidaymakers.

23. A DIFFERENT SEA; Claudio Magris: a young intellectual flees Austria-Hungary for the Patagonian pampas and reading Greek classics after his hero and mentor commits suicide; his search for an "authentic life" is completely fucked over by the inevitable unpleasantness of history

24. DOCTOR GLAS: Hjalmar Söderberg: brilliant, dark 1905 Swedish masterpiece about a depressive doctor in love with a woman whose monstrous clergyman husband insists on his "marital rights"; complications ensue, as they say