As I noted in my prior entry, Real Life (mostly academics) keeps interfering with my pleasure reading. This year, that meant I did not read for fun for almost four months. While I know that the voluminous amounts of reading I have to do for school will invariably come first, I am making an effort to keep up my "fun" reading in 2008 by setting aside at least ten minutes each day for this very purpose. As in past years, this year I will count the number of books and pages I read for fun, but unlike past years, I will not set a goal for a total number of books or pages.

I will be participating in The Short Story Reading Challenge, hosted by Kate's Book Blog.




I have a confession to make. I don't have a very good track record when it comes to short stories. In school, I used to find that the stories I enjoyed most in the literature textbooks would often just be excerpts from longer works, and then I would read those works in their entirety. When it came to reading short stories as a part of my classes as an English major in college, I often felt restless. Part of it is the length, I think - I'm inclined to feel like there is something missing in a short story, be it plot or characterization or some other quality. The other reason seems to be that I usually come to the end of a story and feel like I've missed the whole point. This happened to me when I read "The Story of a Nobody" by Anton Chekhov - I think I still may be looking for the meaning of that work! Theoretically, I know that there must be good short story writers out there, that the length of a work does not define its quality, but I think I can count on one hand the short stories that I have enjoyed. These include: "The Metamorphosis" by Kafka (is this a book or a short story? I am never sure), The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros (more a series of vignettes, I suppose), and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

This year, I intend to make an attempt to find at least a few short stories that I do like. I have chosen to go with Option 5 of the Challenge (which seems to be a "make-your-own" option). So far, I have compiled a list of writers who I have had a taste of before or whose work sounds intriguing. I hope through 2008 to return to the list below (and any suggestions you may have for me, which I will add to the list) and have plenty to read. I also hope by the end of 2008, I will have discovered some new favorite writers and a few more favorite short stories to bring me up to two hands of counting! ;)

The writers currently on my list - with possible works to read - are:

Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories
R.K. Narayan, The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories
James Thurber, 92 Stories
Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (and others)
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors
L.M. Montgomery, Across the Miles
Nikolai Gogol, Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find

I also reserve the right to change this list at any time during the year.

If you have any recommendations, I would love to hear them! :)

I will aim for at least three stories from each collection. However, I will only count the collections in my book total if I finish them. The stories will be counted in my page total.