Six non-fiction books you can read in a day

livemint.com:

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 an ordinary life, this memoir was written at the beginning of the 19th century in Qing-dynasty China by a widowed scholar. Despite the lapse of time, Shen Fu’s joys and sorrows feel comfortingly familiar. He was a civil servant who, though highly educated for his time, did not manage to rise up the ranks.

He quarrelled 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 years old) and, as Shen’s memoir reveals, he treated Chen Yun like an equal, admiring her practicality and sparring with her in ad lib poetry competitions. The book has long been cherished in China as a true account of deep love.

For modern readers the records may hold some surprises, too. Shen loved flower arranging. And although he and Yun adored each other, she matter-of-factly sought out a concubine for him—with whom, the text implies, she also had sex (lesbian relationships were not especially frowned upon at the time).

The translators’ judicious footnotes make the reading all the more pleasurable. Oranges. By John McPhee.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 149 pages; $16. Daunt; £9.99 Are there 150 sparkling pages to be written about the everyday orange? John McPhee proves there are. “Oranges", which evolved from an essay published in the New Yorker in 1966, established a new form of journalism: one that marries whimsy with forensic explanatory reporting.