Ask HN: What are the best short books that you can read in an evening?

What kind of books do you like?

Personally, I recommend reading the novella "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, on which the film Arrival was based, because the novel is quite a bit different from the movie and takes the whole topic of non-temporal existence in a much more Slaughterhouse-Five direction.

If you're craving some philosophy I would recommend "The Problems of Philosophy" by Bertrand Russell. It's about 160 pages and you can easily skip around to chapters that interest you. Quite thought-provoking.