Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Alice Munro’s stories conjure up feelings that I don’t normally experience from reading fiction. I abandon my concern with plot or character arcs (though these are certainly present) and instead allow myself to be transported by the beauty of each story as a whole. Every story is perfect and contains universes; to read them is to feel humble and uplifted at the same time. I finish each one and feel more like I have been staring at a beautiful painting or listening to music, than reading a book.

That said, I can’t read them very often, or read a lot of them in a row. To do so leads to feelings of overindulgence, like eating too much exquisite chocolate. You start to lose your ability to appreciate the subtleties and you are just blinded by the light. Am I overdoing my praise here? I don’t think so. All art forms have pinnacles and astute observers can recognize when an artist has reached one. It doesn’t mean that other artists can’t get there too, or haven’t gone there already. I’m just saying that Munro is there and I’m glad the Nobel committee has affirmed it. It’s gratifying to see this modest woman receive the honor she is due.

Should you read these stories? Absolutely. This volume, published in 2001, is as good a place as any to start. They are accessible, poignant stories about ordinary people in ordinary situations. A lot of them are about middle-aged people coming to terms with their lives’ decisions. One especially powerful one is about two people stuck on a golf course in a thunderstorm. Only it’s not really about that at all. As you read it you will feel the hair on the back of your neck stand up, just like the characters do in the story, but for different reasons.

(Book 35, 2013)

Minnie's Room by Mollie Panter-Downes

The short stories in this volume continue the author’s piercing commentary on the social life and customs of the English middle class, which she began in her earlier volume Good Evening Mrs. Craven (and which I wrote about back in 2007). While that earlier volume covers the war years (late 1930’s to mid 1940’s), Minnie’s Room picks up in postwar London where good food was scarce, coal for heat was scarcer, and the servants had all run off. Left alone to fend for themselves in large cold houses, the postwar years were bleak indeed for middle class matrons and their long suffering husbands. How could this possibly be entertaining to read about, you might ask? But it is! As I said in my post about her earlier book, Panter-Downes writes tiny little gems that say everything in a few words. The self-absorption of these characters who cannot conceive that life has changed forever, and the complete sense of entitlement they exhibit in the face of all evidence to the contrary make for entertaining reading from the vantage point of the 21st century.

This book was published by Persephone Books, a UK publisher of neglected books by twentieth century (mostly women) authors. I’ve written about Persephone before on this blog; click on the Persephone tag in the tag cloud at right to see all my posts. I love their books but they are not so easy to get from the public library. I’ve bought several of their titles directly from their website (here is a link to their page about Minnie’s Room) and have also found them at Memorial Library at the University of Wisconsin, which is where I found this one (and a few others) on a midwinter trip deep into the stacks. Ah the smell of old library books! Library lovers will know what I mean; all others may sneeze at the mere mention of it.

(Book 4, 2013)

The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

I picked this up at the library on the new fiction shelf. As much as I am enjoying Mockingjay, I needed a small dose of literary fiction as a palate cleanser. Desai is something of a grande dame of Indian letters. In my pre-blog days I read her novel Feasting, Fasting, but haven’t come across anything by her in a long time.

Much of contemporary Indian fiction written in English deals with the conflict between the old India and the new India, and these stories are no exception. One of the stories is about a woman who translates fiction written in indigenous Indian languages into English. Some of the tension in the story comes from exploring the relative value of these languages and their literature vs. that of literature written in (or translated into) English. Desai brings an economy of words and emotions to this theme, never revealing her personal bias but I kept wondering what she really thought, as a noted writer of fiction in English, and as a professor at a U.S. university.

This slim volume contains just three longish short stories and it was a perfect diversion. It would also be a good way to get acquainted with Desai’s work, or a quick way to get your annual number of books read up to a respectable number before December 31. Not that I was doing that.

(Book 34, 2012)

Drifting House by Krys Lee

Regular blog followers know that I like to read fiction about the immigrant experience. Books like Away, by Amy Bloom (Eastern European Jewish immigrants); Brooklyn, by Colm Toibin (Irish); Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See (Chinese); and Voice of America, by E. C. Osondu (Nigerian) offer insight into how people deal with loss and change and how they survive (and with any luck, thrive) in new situations.

Drifting House covers new territory for me. It’s a collection of short stories that describe the experience of emigrating from Korea to the U.S., or in some stories, the experience of escaping from North Korea to South Korea or to China. These are not happy tales (especially the North Korean ones, as you would imagine) and even in the stories where people move from South Korea to relatively secure situations in California, the characters experience little optimism or renewal. Lee’s writing is precise and crystal clear, but also icy cold. Her characters remain opaque and I did not connect to any of them.

This is a slim volume, easily digested in small doses. I do think it does a good job adding another piece to the puzzle that is the American immigrant experience. Not everyone is as happy to be here as we might think, even if what they left behind wasn’t so hot either.

(Book 12, 2012)

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke

This is a shorter, less daunting offering from Susanna Clarke, who gave us the weighty and (ultimately for me unreadable) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. A few of the stories are quite good; the first one, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, is clever and original and got me all excited to read more. But I should have been tipped off by the book’s (fictional) introduction by the (fictional) professor James Sutherland, Director of Sidhe Studies at the University of Aberdeen, about how Clarke’s collection seeks to illuminate the study of magic and faerie throughout British history. Instead of using a coherent storytelling voice, Clarke has created a mishmash of stories featuring wildly different narrative styles and devices, and sprinkled with faux scholarship and obscure literary and historical references. It didn’t matter than I liked the first story because its style and substance bore no resemblance to any story that followed.

I suppose for true devotees of fantasy (especially faerie-centered fantasy) this approach wouldn’t be a problem but I was just looking for something consistently entertaining and I felt a little bit cheated. The story The Ladies of Grace Adieu is set in the 19th century England of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell and made me think that maybe I should go back and try again to read that book. But I did try, and it was just Too Much. Remember the footnotes (all 185 of them)?

(Book 35, 2011)

In the Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

Until recently I believed that literary genres were fairly static. We had literary fiction, popular fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, mysteries. Now I feel like I discover new genres all the time. Maybe these new genres are really sub-genres of these larger groups, but who cares? It’s fun. A few weeks ago I wrote about tartan noir. Today I’m writing about slipstream, fiction with a fantastical edge to it, not really fantasy, but not realistic fiction either. I love it.

The stories in this book are uneven in how closely they walk the boundary between fantasy and reality. They are also uneven in quality. The title story In the Forest of Forgetting is just brilliant. It’s a vivid mixture of traditional fairy tale (an innocent maiden wanders alone into a forest and encounters a witch) and reality (the forest is illness; the witch is a surgeon; the walk through the forest is a journey towards death from breast cancer). I also loved Sleeping with Bears, which is available on this website. You can read a few other stories on Goss’s own website, here. Some of them appear in the volume I just read, and others stand alone.

I want to read more books like this one but have trouble finding them. Suggestions?

(Book 11, 2011)

Voice of America by E. C. Osondu

An editor at Harper sent me a review copy of this book. I’d never heard of Osondu, though the first story in this book, Waiting, won the 2009 Caine Prize, which is a literary prize for the best original short story by an African writer who is writing in English.

Waiting is a very moving story of young people living in a refugee camp, waiting for what? They wait for food, for clothing, for things to change, for a chance to go to America. Most stories in this book are set in Nigeria but a few are set in the U.S. I liked the Nigerian stories better, especially a story called Jimmy Carter’s Eyes, which is available online here.

What I found really interesting was the way Osondu explored the relationship between Africans and African Americans. Several stories (some set in the U.S., others in Nigeria) deal with the expectations that Africans have regarding African Americans, and vice versa. The cultural divide between these groups is huge, and Osondu exploits it for purposes both comic and tragic.

Osondu’s writing style is spare but not macho. He makes his observations with a minimum of fuss, so even a drama-filled story about a beachfront firing squad is an exercise in control. And while it is clearly not Osondu’s intention to remind his U.S. readers how good they have it, he achieves this nevertheless. I read Waiting from the comfort of my warm house, surrounded by my loving family, and was grateful for everything I had.

(Book 56, 2010)

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

I have been struggling to capture the subtleties of this book. Leah Hager Cohen, writing in the New York Times, does a better job than I can. These are typical Munro short stories; they appear simple at first reading, but then hit you like a rocket attack once you get going.

Sometimes these stories aren’t really about what they seem to be about, if you know what I mean. Even when they seem to be about “big” issues (such as domestic violence, for example), their power comes from something else, from something small that happens in the last few seconds, something that you can almost overlook, like the tiny murder that is going on in the corner of the painting.

Alice Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize, which honors “one writer's overall contribution to fiction on the world stage” (Man Booker Prize archive website: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/prize/mbi-archive/43). She has written a lot of books, but I’ve only read a handful. It takes me a long time to get through one of her volumes because I have to read a story, and then rest for a while. Then I can do another one. That’s how powerful they are.

(Book 52, 2010)

Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson

Jean Thompson flies under the radar. I had never heard of her until this most recent collection of short stories, which did make a splash, at least in literary circles. But apparently she’s been around for a while, writing high quality short fiction and a few novels. Reviewers of Do Not Deny Me compared her to Alice Munro whom I think is brilliant, so I thought I would try these. (I see from a little research that Thompson was a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and has had books on the New York Times Notable Book list. I'm not sure how I missed her. As my kids say, "my bad.")

Thompson’s characters fly under the radar too. A lot of them are folks you might see at the gas station or the grocery store; people you wouldn’t notice but who nevertheless have real issues that Thompson explores with care and tenderness. In one story a woman worries that her neighbor’s children are being abused. She tries to make contact with the children but is frightened away by their father. Then the family moves away. That’s it. It was so real I felt like I could have been reading a newspaper story; not because Thompson uses a journalistic style but because the events were so mundane yet so universal.

The only problem with this approach is that the details don’t stick with me. Like the news I read in the local paper about apartment fires and car accidents, these stories run together in my head and I can’t really remember what happened to which character. That doesn’t mean they aren't excellent, and worth reading.

(Book 14, 2010)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

I heard Daniyal Mueenuddin interviewed on NPR recently and that made me check out this book. I see now that it’s getting a lot of press, which it deserves. The book is a series of connected short stories centered around one powerful family in Punjab: their patriarch, his employees, and their families. Some characters pop up in multiple stories while others do not. I like this kind of device. The common threads unify the whole package, while the shifting protagonists provide variety. (Observant blog readers will notice I contradict myself; I complained about this very device in this post a few weeks ago. But while the characters in Olive Kitteridge were underdeveloped and interchangeable, Mueenuddin's characters are sharply drawn and memorable.)

I’ve read a lot of books about India but never one about Pakistan. I was struck by the similarities in the two cultures. For some reason I had thought of Pakistan as being very different from India. But a lot of the themes of this book (class inequities, gender and family relationships, remnants of colonialism) are present in much of the Indian literature that I’ve read. And everyone was eating the same food!

Another theme that runs through the book is the corruption of Pakistani society. Several stories deal with rigged elections, biased judges, sweetheart deals, and cronyism. Mueenuddin manages to frame these issues around convincing, sympathetic characters (who exist on either side of the line), leading us like a tour guide through the gray areas of Pakistani business and society. Along the same lines, women don’t fare particularly well. Many of his female characters use their sexuality skillfully, though often not to their own best interests in the end. But you get the feeling they don’t have a lot of choices.

(Book 45, 2009)

Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy

If you had a close family member who was dying in the hospital, this would be the book to read at the bedside. Waiting to hear whether your loved ones survived the plane crash? Ditto. This book is so relentlessly cheerful and uplifting I had to stop reading it. Every single person in this book rises above their pain and finds new meaning in the hand God dealt them. At first it’s energizing, then it gradually begins to go all gooey, like a chocolate cake left outside on a hot day. I got about two thirds of the way through and quit.

I used to read Maeve Binchy years ago and I will still assert that her early novels (Light a Penny Candle, Circle of Friends) are really excellent. Yes, they are beach reads, but they are more than that also. They contain subtlety, sly humor, and a great deal of honesty. Binchy’s writing is far superior to many of those with whom she shares the supermarket book rack. I have tried to keep up with her latest offerings, but haven’t really enjoyed them. Whitethorn Woods was better than some, but still far from her best effort.

I also can’t figure out why this is marketed as a novel. It’s really a collection of connected short stories that feature the current and former residents of a small town in Ireland. Characters pop up in each other’s stories, but otherwise I found little continuity and no narrative arc. This is a comfort read, best dipped into in times of stress and otherwise ignored.

(Book 30 2008)

Wizards, Edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois

I picked this up from the new release shelf at the library. It’s a collection of fantasy short stories by several authors including Elizabeth Hand, Gene Wolf, Eoin Colfer, Patricia McKillip, Jane Yolen, Nancy Kress, and others. I thought it would be a good way to try out some of these people.

I didn’t read every story, though I tried to! But in all honesty, I abandoned several of them very quickly. I didn’t want to read any that were set in schools of wizardry; J. K. Rowling now owns that territory, as far as I am concerned, and also, I prefer to read about adults. I also skipped the ones set in contemporary times. But I did read and enjoy The Witch’s Headstone by Neil Gaiman, Holly and Iron by Garth Nix, The Stranger’s Hands by Tad Williams, Zinder by Tanith Lee, and Stonefather by Orson Scott Card. My favorite was Holly and Iron by Garth Nix, a writer who is new to me (though my son has long been a fan). I also liked Stonefather by Orson Scott Card. The notes for this story tell me that Card will soon come out with a series set in this same fantasy world, so that is something to look forward to.

(Book 22, 2008)

In Case We're Separated by Alice Mattison

This past weekend, Stephen King, writing in the New York Times Book Review asks “What Ails the Short Story?” “The American short story is alive and well,” he begins, then continues “Do you like the sound of that? Me too. I only wish it were true.” King claims mixed health for the short story, but is excited about the stories chosen (by him) for the Best American Short Stories of 2007, of which he is the editor. He does complain, however, that many short stories read like they were written for an audience that consists of “other writers and would-be writers who are reading the various literary magazines.” Later he says these stories seem to be written “for editors and teachers rather than for readers.” He attributes this problem to the shrinking audience for short stories; almost no one reads short stories in magazines any more, he says, especially in literary magazines.

I want Stephen King to know that the audience for short stories has recently grown by one – this volume by Alice Mattison is the fifth collection I’ve read this year. However, I would agree with him on the charge that very few people buy literary magazines. I know I don’t, and I also almost never read the short stories that appear in magazines such as The New Yorker. King does make a good advocate for his Best American Short Stories of 2007, though, and I think I will give that a try.

The connected stories in In Case We’re Separated encompass fifty years in the life of an extended family in Brooklyn (and further afield). The stories have a gritty realism that I associate with stories about urban life, especially urban life in the mid-20^th century when many of these stories take place. The characters in these stories are mostly first generation Americans, living in crowded apartments, still adjusting to life in America. Some reviewers compare the stories in this book to those written by Grace Paley, but I was reminded of more contemporary stories and novels by Binnie Kirschenbaum. The writing is excellent, the characters are extremely realistic, and the observations are keen. I really enjoyed these stories.

The author also features several recurring themes within the stories, which brings me to my next topic, King’s comment that many modern stories seem to be written “for editors and teachers.” At the end of this volume of stories is a note from the author telling us that the stories were crafted according to the dictates of a double sestina, a complicated poetic form that requires recurring words or themes for each stanza (or in this case, each story) which must repeat in a prescribed order. Wow, tricky. Did I miss this? Yes, I did, even though one of the stories in the middle of the book is called Brooklyn Sestina, and it describes the form. I did NOT miss all the recurring themes, however, though some are more obvious than others. Only someone familiar with the sestina and its variations would have noticed that the author did this, someone like an English teacher, or a poet, for example. So is King right? Is Alice Mattison, by employing a complicated poetic form, seeking to gain the admiration of other writers and professors, the only people likely to notice (and by King’s assessment, the only people reading short stories)? Or did she just take this route as a way of challenging herself as a writer? I don’t know. But it’s interesting.

(Book 43, 2007)

Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

I used to read Alice Hoffman years ago, but I stopped, and I’m not sure why. It isn’t that I don’t like magical realism, because I do. I think I read something of hers that veered too far off into the realm of horror, though I can’t remember what it was. How’s that for sounding like I don’t know what I’m talking about?

I picked up Blackbird House because I was in the mood for some short stories, and I’ve enjoyed books with this kind of premise before: the book offers a series of connected stories about a place, where the action happens over a long span of time. Sometimes characters recur from story to story, but sometimes not. Characters who take center stage in one story might be peripheral in a later one. Descendants of early characters inhabit the later stories.

I had forgotten what a beautiful writer Hoffman is. Not a word is wrong in these stories; the images are haunting and beautiful. The white-feathered blackbird who appears in every story, well some might say it’s a bit heavy-handed, but I liked waiting for it to appear.

Blackbird House was built on Cape Cod hundreds of years ago, and is the scene of much tragedy, but also much healing. The stories begin in the 1700’s and continue to the present day. Illness, isolation, loneliness, violence, redemption and second chances are all themes. Ten-year old boys occur frequently. They are often the fulcrum around which a story turns.

This is a slim volume, which some might read in a weekend, but it took me a long time. I never wanted to read it unless I knew I could read a single story all in one sitting, so I had to wait for those opportunities. It was worth it.

(Book 25, 2007)

The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose by Alice Munro

This is one of Munro's earliest books, written in the late 1970's. It's a series of connected short stories about Flo and her stepdaughter Rose. I liked Flo, but not Rose so much. No, that's not true. I liked Rose when she was young, and living at home with Flo. Those stories make up the first half of the book. Set in rural West Hanratty, Ontario during World War II, Flo and Rose are beset by poverty, ignorance, and the narrow-minded intolerance of their neighbors. Flo runs a grocery store on the wrong side of the tracks, and Rose, her invalid father, and her half-brother live in the back. It's a difficult time: the war is a distant, yet threatening presence. Rose struggles to avoid the bullies on the playground (the big boys) and in the classroom (the teachers), and manages to complete her entrance exams for high school. For this achievement, Flo cautions her not to get above herself. Flo is a sly survivor. She knows that the prospects for a smart girl are nothing special. She is secretly proud of Rose’s achievements, but will never say as much. The high school is only marginally better than the primary school, insofar as it has indoor plumbing and heat.

I thought this was going to end up as a classic "smart girl escapes from poverty and finds happiness" story, but it wasn't. I should have realized that a writer as good as Munro wouldn't take the obvious path. Rose makes it to university but her confidence has already been eroded. She settles for a perverse marriage to the wealthy and controlling Patrick, mostly because she hasn’t the strength to admit she doesn’t want him. Tennyson’s poem The Beggar Maid tells of the lovely, destitute maiden who is rescued by King Cophetua. But Patrick, the department store heir, is as much Rose's jailer as her rescuer. Eventually she leaves him and embarks on a series of ill-conceived careers and unfulfilling relationships. Set against the backdrop of the 1960’s I didn’t enjoy these stories as much. Rose does a lot of drinking, a lot of sleeping around, and some bad mothering. Unlike the early stories, which led up to Rose’s successful escape from West Hanratty, these stories lingered over her failures.

I am interested in the way Munro presents poverty and brutality without flinching, as if they are the most normal parts of people’s lives, which of course in some cases they are. The last few stories in the book describe Rose’s return to West Hanratty to care for the ailing Flo, who is still living in the shuttered, rundown store amid decades of trash. Rose’s conflicted relationship with her stepmother and with her childhood are never completely resolved. But a pat resolution would have cheapened the reading experience, I think.

(Book 19, 2007)

Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes

This was published by Persephone Books, but unlike some Persephone titles, which are reprints of books published long ago, this is a new collection of previously uncollected short stories. Mollie Panter-Downes wrote for the New Yorker for many years and is better known in US literary circles than she is in Britain (though I was not familiar with her work). All these stories were originally published in the New Yorker magazine, and most have never been reprinted since their original publication during WWII.

The stories are tiny gems. Each is no more than a few pages long, and all of them are funny, sharp, and entertaining. The stories progress chronologically through the war years, providing trenchant observations about domestic life, relationships and the increasing hardships faced by those on the home front. Panter-Downes was first and foremost a journalist; in addition to these stories she wrote (among other things) a series of Letters from London, reporting on the war, which were also published in the New Yorker and which I believe were collected into a volume published in the early 1970's, edited by William Shawn. The stories in Good Evening Mrs. Craven are just as legitimate a form of reportage as any non-fiction article and indeed they illuminate delicate issues that are harder to report upon in a non-fiction format, such as the subtle class conflicts that occur when a middle class matron must provide housing for working class evacuees. Panter-Downes is brilliant at satire, and can say so much in so few words. These stories would make wonderful examples for new writers about how to use language and description with economy and elegance.

Persephone has also collected Panter-Downes' peacetime stories which deal with the social changes that occurred in the postwar years. That collection is entitled Minnie's Room.

Persephone customers receive a free subscription to the Persephone Quarterly. I just received my first issue of this and it made wonderful bedtime reading. I'm longing to attend the upcoming Tea at Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden, Cranbrook, Kent to celebrate Persephone's release of The Shuttle, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Great Maytham Hall is the setting for The Shuttle, but it also is the home of the walled garden that features in The Secret Garden, one of Burnett's most famous books (and one of my favorites). This event will take place on June 20, alas, without me.

(Book 17, 2007)

Now You See It...Stories from Cokesville by Bathsheba Monk

These stories can stand alone, but are better taken as a collection that adds up to a novel. Cokesville is a steel mill town in Pennsylvania, and these stories describe the town and its inhabitants during years of great change, from 1949 through 1994. Vietnam is a recurring theme, as is the disintegration of a small town that occurs when the major industry shuts down. Cokesville is slowly dying, and then, in a brilliant piece of fictional theatre, disappears altogether. This last bit occurs offstage, and plays out so subtly that you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention. Hence the book’s title.

While the book’s larger theme is serious, the stories are studded with quirky characters and funny interludes. The story called Mrs. Herbinko’s Birthday Party is whimsical and will leave you smiling. The book reminded me of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, by Dean Bakapoulis, another really wonderful book about working class families struggling to adjust to enormous changes. Both these books have a lot of heart.

This is Bathsheba Monk’s first book. In April 2006 she published a piece in the New York Times Magazine called Coal Miner's Granddaughter about her experiences teaching writing at a community college in the town where she grew up, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. I read that article with interest, but apparently she offended a lot of locals with what they considered her condescending tone. I felt that her piece was honest and open. Perhaps the same people will be offended by this book, but I hope not. I couldn't find an online review, except for this link to an NPR interview. Here is a link to her web site.

(Book 54, 2006)

This is Not Chick Lit, Edited by Elizabeth Merrick

I’ve been seeing this around, and was curious. Ms. NonAnon, who blogs at Nonfiction Readers Anonymous calls the chick lit controversy the “Great Chick Lit Smackdown.” Like Ms. Nonanon, I have no desire to engage in labeling, or in condemning people for their reading choices. That said, I fail to get the appeal of chick lit. I want to like these books; the covers are so appealing! But I’ve tried several titles, and have found very few that were good enough to even finish. The predictable plots and poor writing make me cringe. They seem to take no skill or originality to write, and that angers me.

So why were the stories in this book collected under this title? After a certain amount of dancing around the issue (“What’s wrong with a little light fluffy reading?”), Merrick makes this point in her introduction:

Chick lit’s formula numbs our senses. Literature, by contrast, grants us access to countless new cultures, places, and inner lives. Where chick lit reduces the complexity of the human experience, literature increases our awareness of other perspectives and paths. …Chick lit shuts down our consciousness. Literature expands our imaginations.

I just have to agree with her. Merrick also makes the point that the stacks of pink covers on the tables at Borders are in danger of obscuring the real literary works of women writing today. In response to this, Merrick has collected the stories in this book as examples of the kinds of groundbreaking literature that women are writing right now.

I found these stories to be uniformly high quality. Some were more interesting to me than others, but all were original, unexpected, highly creative, and extremely well written. Authors range from older, established writers such as Mary Gordon and Francine Prose, to younger writers like Curtis Sittenfeld.

For me, the book will serve as a guide for selecting the next batch of authors that I want to read. The first author on my new list is Judy Budnitz, whose story Joan, Jeanne, La Pucelle, Maid of Orleans, is just brilliant, and certainly one of the best things I’ve read all year. I just love it when my reaction to a book or a short story is one of awe and amazement that anyone could be so creative and skillful to think up the plot and spin out the tale with such subtlety and imagination. Several of the stories in this collection generated this response from me, but Budnitz’s story was the highlight.

You can read more about this book here; this is just one article out of many. To find more, search for "Merrick chick lit" in Google.
(Book 44, 2006)

Rituals; Reading in Bed; More about Short Stories

I read before I go to sleep every night. It’s part of my bedtime ritual. Even on nights that I’m completely exhausted, I can’t fall asleep unless I have read just a little bit. I read until the words start to blur on the page. Sometimes this happens quickly. Other nights I may read for 30 minutes or more. If I am at a really good part and I push through the sleepiness and keep reading, I’m in trouble, because then it might be hours before I feel sleepy again. Or, I may be able to fall asleep, but I don’t sleep well, and often end up dreaming about the book I was reading.

If it’s bedtime, and I’m about to finish a book, I won’t usually read it, because I like to be awake so that I can process the book’s ending. I’ll save the ending to read during the day when I’m more awake, and I’ll read something else before bed, like a magazine. Likewise, I will often not start a new book just before going to bed if I know that I am sleepy because I’ll just have to start it over again the next night.

Why am I talking about this? Because it’s led me to identify another problem with reading short stories. It’s all the starting and stopping. I don’t like moving on from one story to the next with no break in between. And I don’t like starting a story when I am too tired to appreciate it. It’s like each story is a mini-book and I need to apply the same starting and stopping rituals to them that I apply to full-length novels, or else I don’t enjoy them as much.

In a perfect world I would be able to read one short story a day while wide awake and sitting in a comfortable chair with a cup of tea at hand. But I can’t; many days the only reading time I get is before bed. Maybe I need to look at short stories as something I read occasionally, when the time is right, and read only novels or longer nonfiction before bed.

Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields

I have read all of Carol Shields' novels, and really mourned her death in 2003. Two of her books are on my list of all time favorites: her final novel Unless, and an earlier one called The Republic of Love. Consistent with my habit of NOT liking any books that win the Pulitzer Prize, The Stone Diaries was my least favorite of her novels. I felt very sad when I finished reading Unless, because it was like saying good-bye to her.

I encountered Dressing Up for the Carnival by accident one day as I was perusing the shelves at the library and was happily surprised; it was kind of like discovering that there were a few more chocolates left in the box after all. I had forgotten she had written a lot of short stories, which I had earlier scorned in my mistaken belief that I hated the format.

However, Dressing Up for the Carnival reminded me of what I don't like about short stories. Am I drifting back to my original position? They were beautifully written. But each one was very forgettable. They made sense at the time of reading, but once I walked away, I couldn't remember what any of them were about.

Must it be the goal of an author to tell a memorable story, or is it okay just to entertain the reader at the moment of reading? I felt like this collection accomplished the latter goal, but not the former. Shields is certainly capable of the former. In her novels she creates memorable characters in situations that make a lasting impression. I could tell you the plot of Unless right now. But I couldn't tell you what any of these stories were about, though it was a pleasure to read them nonetheless.

This book's grade is B.
(Book 36, 2006)