Our November challenge book. Admittedly many of these stories are drawn from older/earlier writers, but a big chunk of them felt dated to me moreso in their style than anything else. This is just a random, not researched or well thought out, theory but modern short stories seem to have stronger plots, better drawn (and perhaps intenser) situations, more things happen, and people have stronger reactions to the happenings, while many of the stories from earlier times seem more passive: one character “telling the story” to another, i.e., stories told at a remove (via third person, epistolary, storytelling or other device). Stories where almost nothing happens, or the sense that something “might” happen (sometimes a very specific thing) turns out…not. And then the story just…ends.

Although the Byatt-edited collection we read earlier in the year had stated that it picked “scary” stories purposely, we both found a lot of those icky, or super sad, but not scary. This collection however had some real creep-you-outers.

My favorite was “The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen.

p.s. yes you’re right it’s sad that it has taken me so long to get to writing about anything I read in October or November that I don’t have the DadReactions to these challenges in my head anymore. But you’ll live without them, I’m sure.

What a behemoth of a book for us to have picked for our challenge. As you may remember, we wound out spreading this one out and reading it in both July AND October and even then it was touch and go whether we’d finish this one as it’s just too darn big for me to carry around (and I do apparently almost all my reading in transit).

There were a few oldies thrown in at the beginning, where I thought “what is this one doing here?” (i.e., given the composition of the rest of the choices), but for the most part I thought these were good stories. My favorites were “The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones, “Firelight” by Tobias Wolff, “Blue Boy” by Kevin Canty, “Anthropology” by Andrea Lee and “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” by George Saunders. And my least favorite was the Mary Gaitskill next to which I wrote just “Ick.”