Short Stories
I’ve rarely read short stories except when assigned in school. I prefer my stories long; the longer the better. Why wouldn’t a person want a book to be long if it tells a good story?
Did I miss out? To find out, I’ve designated 2024 as my year of the short story. I began with “The Complete Sort Stories of Ernest Hemingway” and have read collections by George Saunders and Barbara Kingsolver plus ghost stories and mysteries.* I’m currently reading “The Best Medicine: Stories Of Healing”. **
I’m disappointed more than I expected. The stories I’ve read seemed vague, sometimes hard to understand, often with unsatisfying conclusions. I should probably read a Stephen King collection. I’m sure they would be an antidote. I liked Hemingway’s stories best; especially the Nick Adams stories. Put them together and they could be chapters in a novel covering Nick’s life from childhood into middle age. All the other short stories I read this year are forgettable.
I mentioned Stephen King. I should also mention Arthur Conan Doyle. They wrote short stories I enjoyed. I read all of Conan Doyle’s stories when I was a teenager. I read them from my father’s two-volume collection of the complete Sherlock Holmes. My best friend in 1979 lent me a copy of King’s “Night Shift” a scary collection of short stories. That was my introduction to Stephen King. Since then, I read or listened to most of his novels up to “Holly”, published last year. I’ve read no more of his short stories.
I don’t think I’ll spend much time on short stories in the future. I may catch up on more of King’s, and I plan to read the collections currently part of my 2024 reading program including collections by Flannery O’Connor, Bryan Washington, Hilary Mantel, Washington Irving, R.K. Narayan, and Nadine Gordimer. Then I’ll stick to the longer stuff, the longer the better.
As an aside, I just heard on a YouTube video that people today don’t have time to read longer books. Nonsense. This would only be true if people wanted to read many books. It takes no more time to read a 600-page book than it does to read three, 200-page books.
* Niffenegger, Audrey, Editor. ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories, 2015
Towles, Amor, Editor. The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023, 2023
** Dalrymple, Theodore, Editor. The Best Medicine: Stories of Healing, 2001