Short Stories on Wednesdays #12 September 28, 2011

 

Short Stories on Wednesdays is a weekly event hosted here, at Bread Crumb Reads. The purpose of this event is to encourage people to read at least one short story a week. There are no limits, of course! If you have made a post on the short stories you’ve read this week, please do leave a link in the comments section. If you haven’t made a post, it does not matter. I’d still love to know what you’ve been reading. Just put the titles down in the comments section.

Only yesterday the Selected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe came to my doorstep. It is one of a few books my husband has gifted to me as an anniversary present. I couldn’t help but start flipping through the pages, and then immersing myself in the short stories. I haven’t read more than three, but they have been strange and fascinating to read. I’ll have to admit to some ignorance to many of the literary and art allusions, that I’m sure, had I known them, I would have appreciated the stories more. However, they are obviously not detrimental to the understanding of the stories on the whole.

The Duc De L’Omelette

The Duc de L’Omelette dies after choking on an olive. Three days after his death he comes face to face with the Devil himself. The duc tries to cross swords with the latter, but after learning that the Devil doesn’t fence, they gamble. The duc comes out as the winner. And the duc’s parting shot is rather funny (after I used the translator and figured what that comment meant!), and reminded me so much of the days of the Regency when the French were the leaders of fashion and social customs. If you’ve read Georgette Heyer, the Duc is rather reminiscent of the likes of the Duke(s) of Avon The Black Moth and These Old Shades, though highly French!

This short story is only about three pages long in my book, and is really a humourous read.However, I must confess, I had to read this story twice before I understood it. I suppose the reason why it went completely over my head the first time was because I was really tired at the time and too impatient to decipher the many French phrases and words. The second time is when I really fared well, and decided not to be lazy about using an online translator. 

MS. Found in a Bottle

The narrator, a seaman, and a Swede, are the only survivors on a ship tossed about by a rather unnatural storm. For five days they rock along the highseas towards the south while the freak storm gets stranger and more supernatural by the day. On the sixth day their ship is hit by one that is much bigger. The Swede does not make it alive, but the narrator manages to survive, escaping into the cabins of the other ship. But its inhabitants are seemingly old me who never notice him even he stands in front of them and talks to them. From what I understood, this sixth day is an eternity, for the narrator says half way through… 

 We waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day – that day to me has not yet arrived – to the Swede never did arrive.

 We learn that the narrator manages to get his tale across only as a message in a bottle.

All I could see, while reading this short story, was a dull orange, read colour – hell, perhaps, with a stillness more terrifying than, perhaps, fire. The ship seems to be a ship of the damned. And yet everything is so numbingly quiet. This story gave me the chills, though slight, and left my sense suspended in a sort of expectation until the very last few lines that makes me wonder if that ship and the crew, along with the narrator, really did get lost in the whirlpool.

The Assignation

The narrator of this story witnesses a beautiful woman throwing her child into the currents of the Venetian Canals. He also witnesses its rescue by a young man who seems to know the woman. They exchange information on a day and time that the narrator overhears. Then, the young man hops onto the narrator’s gondola and invites him over to his house early in the morning. The narrator goes there and finds this man’s house full of collectibles, many of which are not particularly tasteful, but lots of others that are so familiar to the narrator. They talk while the latter explores the place, and then, the end.

Nope. It does not end with them talking, but I don’t want to give anything else away.

I did have something of a problem with this story, though. While I quite liked it, I found this particular one to be too full of allusions that quite escaped me, and felt, throughout the story, that I was missing a little something by not knowing exactly what these allusions were. Of course, I could sit with an online historical/literary dictionary and check through all of them – but there are too many and I’m an impatient woman. I was also puzzled about the young man. It would seem that his was a famous name. The narrator describes him in great detail…

The person of the stranger – let me call him by this title, who to all the world was still a stranger[...] In height he might have been below rather than above the medium size: although there were moments of intense passion when his frame actually expanded and belie the assertion. The light, almost slender symmetry of his figure promised more of that read activity which he evinced at the Bridge of Sighs, than of that Herculean strength which he has been known to wield without an effort, upon occasions of more dangerous emergency. With the mouth and chin of a deity – singular, wild, full. liquid eyes, whose shadows varied from pure hazel to intense and brilliant jet – and a profusion of curling black hair, from which a forehead of unusual breadth gleamed forth at intervals all light and ivory – his were features than which I have seen none more classically regular, except, perhaps, the marble ones of the Emperor Commodus.

A little later he says this man was an Englishman. Any ideas who this person could be? Or do you think Poe was just adding to the sense of mystery by reporting the fictional fame of this man?

Truly, I’m fast beginning to appreciate Poe’s skill as a short story writer and am looking forward to finishing this short story collection, acquired only yesterday, for the RIP Challenge. However, I’ll try not to make this a promise ’cause I never follow through on those!!

So then, what have you folk been reading this past week in the short story form?…

Short Stories on Wednesdays #11 September 21, 2011

Short Stories on Wednesdays is a weekly event hosted here, at Bread Crumb Reads. The purpose of this event is to encourage people to read at least one short story a week. There are no limits, of course! If you have made a post on the short stories you’ve read this week, please do leave a link in the comments section. If you haven’t made a post, it does not matter. I’d still love to know what you’ve been reading. Just put the titles down in the comments section.Apart from completing a mini novel I haven’t really done much reading.:-/ I’d been hoping to get a short story or two done by today, as part of the RIP Challenge. Anyway, what have you folk been reading by way of short stories this past week?

Short Stories on Wednesdays #10 September 14, 2011

Short Stories on Wednesdays is a weekly event hosted here, at Bread Crumb Reads. The purpose of this event is to encourage people to read at least one short story a week. There are no limits, of course! If you have made a post on the short stories you’ve read this week, please do leave a link in the comments section. If you haven’t made a post, it does not matter. I’d still love to know what you’ve been reading. Just put the titles down in the comments section.“New York Mining Disaster” by Haruki Murakami
This week I decided to get back to Haruki Murakami. I read just one story…unusual as usual. The narrator speaks of a friend of his who loves the zoo and visits it every time there is a typhoon. This friend knows exactly how the zoo animals behave during such a storm. Then the narrator talks of how he borrows this friend’s funeral clothes to go to four funerals in one year. He gives a brief description of how these friends meet their end. On New Year’s Eve of the same year, he meets a woman slightly older than he who conducts a rather strange conversation with the narrator leaving the latter bewildered and nervous. The short story ends with a whole bunch of miners trapped in a mine.

Honestly, nothing of the above seemed particularly connected. At the last couple of paragraphs left me wondering if I’d skipped a page or two and entered another short story! As usual I could not really see the point to Murakami’s narrative. However, again, as usual, his ‘story’ grabbed my attention from the words “a friend of mine”.

If anyone has read this story before I’m eager to hear your thoughts on them! Did I miss something? Or was that ending deliberately vague and unconnected?

So, what short stories have you been reading this past week?

Ten Books I’ve Read So Far This Year Because of Another Blogger September 13, 2011

 Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.

The following books listed isn’t a ‘top ten’ list. These just happen to be ten books I’ve read this year because of another blogger or because of the glowing reports on Goodreads. In parenthesis I’ve given the number of stars of five that I have rated these books on Goodreads.

1.  The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (4 stars – this was a re-read inspired by Jenny O, and was a completely different experience this time around.)
2. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitcell (5 stars – inspired by Jillian who is so passionate about Mitchell)
3. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (5 stars – from glowing reports on Goodreads)
4. Georgette Heyer’s Regency World by Jennifer Kloester (3 stars – egged on by so many interesting reports on Austen blog sites, plus my love for Georgette Heyer’s romances)
5. Amy Tan - The Kitchen God’s Wife (5 stars – I was asked to give this writer a try by some folk from a Goodreads group. The book I borrowed from a friend who suggested I try it.)
6. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (2 stars – encouraged to read this during a read-along)
7. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet by Colleen McCullough (2 stars – curiosity regarding Austen fans’ negative remarks led me to read this…especially as it is written by one of my favourite writers)
8. Evelina by Fanny Burney (3 stars – I managed to read this because of a read-along)
9. Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal (5 stars – inspired by Falaise’s review on this book)
10. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (to-be-read – bought due to the fantastic reviews I’ve reading on blogs about it)

What books have other bloggers inspired you to read?…

Literary Blog Hop: Do Literary Works Have to be Difficult? September 8, 2011

The Literary Blog Hop is hosted biweekly at The Blue Bookcase.

I’m so glad the hop is back! I was beginning to wonder if we’d all run out of questions. And I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t think of any! Anyway…

This week’s question is:

Must all literary writing be difficult? Can you think of examples of literary writing that was not difficult?

Should the question have begun with a ‘must’ or could the question have read ‘Is literary writing difficult’? I make this distinction because it is not a necessity for literary writing to be difficult at all. To me, what makes a piece of work a literary piece, is not just good language, but also the universality of the themes that are dealt with. Centuries old literature that make up the canon, have survived only because they are relevant to our world even today. That, or, there are themes and ideas that mark the progress of man’s way of thinking, or even the digression or degeneration of the process. Language, really has not all that much to do with the level of difficulty, and does not mark it as an active condition for a work to be termed ‘literary’.

Let us take Shakespeare, for instance. Though, for us, ‘Shakespearean English’ as many like to call it, was really the language of the day. Would crowds of groundlings have come to watch Shakespeare’s plays had his language been elite and sophisticated? While certain ideas and themes might have gone over their heads, these people definitely understood what was being said. Then there is the likes of Austen and Dickens (I take these names from the post made by Lucia of The Blue Bookcase)…their chosen writing style belonged to the language and syntax of their times. They were household names; Dicken’s stories came in newspapers – surely the common man was reading them! However, language is a living thing that shifts and changes according to culture and the times. Since none of us talk like Shakespeare or Austen or Dickens, we are bound to find the language difficult to understand. Constant reading of literature form the distant past familiarises use with the language and style, thereby making it easier for us to understand these writers’ works. 

Really, if you take contemporary literary fiction, the language isn’t hard at all, simply because it is a language of our times. Years and years from now, some reader would likely find the likes of The Poisonwood Bible and The Book Thief and Memoirs of a Geisha rather archaic. But it isn’t for us and so it isn’t difficult to read. However, Joseph Conrad comes to mind, in terms of ‘difficult’ literature – and I’m not talking about the language. Conrad’s language is brilliant. And contemporary enough for us to understand. However, it’s the themes he deals with that weigh heavily on our (I don’t mean everyone) inability to read through it quickly or take time for us to digest the content. In my mind, I’m thinking of The Heart of Darkness – a rather thin book in terms of pages, but so weighty in terms of content that it took me nearly two weeks to complete it! That to me, is difficult literature. And while the afore mentioned titles mark contemporary classics, dealing with interesting and/or relevant themes and ideas that make us think and ponder, they do not fall under ‘difficult’ literature. Neither, for that matter, do Austen’s and Dickens’ works.

Short Stories on Wednesdays #9 September 7, 2011

Short Stories on Wednesdays is a weekly event hosted here, at Bread Crumb Reads. The purpose of this event is to encourage people to read at least one short story a week. There are no limits, of course! If you have made a post on the short stories you’ve read this week, please do leave a link in the comments section. If you haven’t made a post, it does not matter. I’d still love to know what you’ve been reading. Just put the titles down in the comments section.

In the last week I found myself reading four short stories. All of them very short. Two of them are by a very young British author called Ben Galley, and two others were suggestions by other bloggers for the RIP Challenge I’m taking part in this year.

Shorts Stories by Ben Galley

I came across this writer when browsing through amazon for free kindle editions. He has a fantasy novel called The Written that seems to be doing pretty well. I decided to check out his website and found that he had three short stories of his up for anyone to peruse. I read two of them (the shorter ones, that is), and found that I quite liked the way this writer wrote. I’m really looking forward to picking up The Written sometime in the next couple of months or so.

• “The Watchers” – This short story was about five pages long and was mostly dialogue. It was amusing, funny and intriguing – in that we don’t know who the conversationalists really are. The watchers are, seemingly, on duty, keeping an eye on earth. One of them is dreadfully bored, the other is very sincere about his job. Hilarity ensues. I did suspect them of being angels at first. But then the end was rather confusing. Honestly, I wish we knew a little more of who or what these people were.You will find the story HERE.
• “The Cardinal” – This was two pages long, simple, yet quite effective. The story is a series of thoughts and memories a bird has as he looks at his old home. It runs along the idea of reincarnation. Not particularly remarkable, but nice. You will find the story HERE.

“The Demon Lover” by Elizabeth Bowen

I read this one on the recommendation of Mel. It was an easy simple read. Eerie, which is what I was looking for considering the challenge. A woman returns to her shut up home in London, many years after the bombing from the Second World War. She sees a mysterious letter addressed to her, and memories come flooding back of a soldier who was once her fiance. A man who seemed to control her in some unexplainable way. Now he offers to meet her at a certain hour again. She begins to panic. The rest is suspense. While I found the ending rather predictable, Bowen’s writing did manage to create that atmosphere of tense fear. I’m looking to reading more of Bowen’s short stories! This short story can be found HERE.

“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe

It was recommended, by alittlefuzzy and Michelle, that I start out with this short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Everyne seemed to agree that it was one of his better horror short stories. I honestly don’t know about that. But I do know that he was freaky to be reading of a murder from the perspective of the murdered – that is, by a psychopathic murder. He makes light of his motives, simply because he sees nothing wrong in them. He likes his old grandfather, but this old man has a cataract eye that scares the narrator out of his wits. So his grandfather has to go. The narrator is fine about it…the murder does not prick his conscience. Or…does it? I couldn’t help but be reminded of the mad man in Dracula, the one who knows a great deal about the count, and tries to warn the group after him. I can’t say I’m particularly enthusiastic about Poe after this. But I’ll be reading on…

So, what short stories have you been reading this past week?

Book Meme: Day 07 – Most underrated book. September 5, 2011

I’ve mentioned how I don’t really work well with extremes, right? Besides, the above title is rather hyperbolic in scope. So, I’ll mention a book I feel ought to get more attention than it ought, rather talk of how underrated it is. Yes. I see a difference between the two. I would mention liking to see more of Stephen R Lawhead and his works, especially on blogs of fantasy fans, but as I’ve already mentioned one of his series in two posts so far in this meme, I’ll bring up another fantasy author and her work.

Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell  looks rather daunting with its story of over 1000 pages and its tiny print. But it is a rather fast paced book once you are past the first fifty pages. Personally, I haven’t really come across any other book like this in my fantasy reads, save for an intriguing short story by Mark Chadbourn called “Who Slays the Gyant, Wounds the Beast”. The story is set during the Napoleonic wars, and revolves around two practicing magicians. They are each experts at what they do, and they are each other’s greatest rivals. Perhaps, only rivals? As the chapters go by their powers and their rivalry get stronger and stronger, and in the midst of it all, history takes place that is, at many points, helped along by these two magicians. There are a great many footnotes as is likely to be found in a good history book. The footnotes are a must read because they detail little stories of Faerie that help the main plot along. It’s a fantastic book, full of the dark, eerie atmosphere that one is bound to attach to original folk faerie tales. I really think that fantasy and non-fantasy fans alike ought to read this book. It’s a rather unique experience in my opinion. And your barely notice the enormity of the pages!

For a more full-fledged review have a look at Becky’s beautifully detailed one at Page Turners.