Short Stories - Dec
How do you slay a dragon?
It depends on how much firepower you have. Enough and you can confront him head-on. Not enough and you have to improvise. In my case, I didn't have enough firepower (time) so to slay the dragon (my reading goal), I had to put several hobbies on hold.
I read at odd times and places; at the crack of dawn, while commuting, in a cafe, in the library, and sometimes even in the kitchen perched on a stool while I was waiting for the soup to thicken. I read in sickness and in health, on good days and on bad days, when I felt inspired and when I was in a slump. I kept up with it.
This last edition covers 23 stories. And so for one last time, here are the details :)
There Will Come Soft Rains - Ray Bradbury
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bradbury and Arthur C. Clark are some of my favorite sci-fi writers and this one was as good, if not better than their other works I've read earlier. The year is 2026 and we're in a fictional city in California that has been destroyed by nuclear war. How and when we do not know. All that remains is one house that has miraculously survived the nuclear fallout and we discover the technology at work inside the house unperturbed from whatever has happened outside.
It's not everyday that I read some sci-fi that is set in the near-future so it's always a treat to see what authors half a century ago were speculating what life would be like in the current age. Also a good reminder to find more near-future, sci-fi writing to complain or rave about.
Summary: On the dangers of nuclear annihilation.
Year Published: 1950
Recommend? Yes
The Waves - Ken Liu
⭐⭐⭐⭐
It's been a while since I had to use ALL of my attention while reading a story. Last time I had to go through such an ordeal was while reading Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger. A post-humanist tale, this one centers around Maggie who is on an intergalactic space mission.
The spaceship gets contacted by the Earth after it's discovered that a scientific breakthrough has made it possible for humans to be immortal. Somehow the spaceship people have access to that technology but not everyone can avail it. If someone chooses to be immortal, another has to die. Maggie chooses immortality and some of her family does not and this is where you see what would it be like living with some of your family that is frozen in time and others that are dead.
That is not even the craziest part. There's plenty of conundrums and thought experiments that come later. Like Twain's story, I disagreed heavily with the characters. The prose is simple, the ideas and their ramifications are not. It's also why I maintain that just because something is well-written does not means it is of substance. World-building in the distant future is no easy feat and Liu deserves his laurels. That being said, it is about the message you are conveying. The one in this sounded fairly sad and bleak to me.
Summary: Imagine a ship of Theseus kind of situation but applied to humans.
Year Published: 2012
Recommend? Yes
The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains - Neil Gaiman
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
When Neil Gaiman is good, he is very good. This is one such instance. A dwarf asks a man to be his guide as he embarks on his journey to find the mysterious cave in the highlands that has golds and silver. The guide had been there many years ago so he knows the way. As the journey continues, we find out more details about these two characters; their past, their obsession with the cave and what actually lies inside there. The prose had me hooked from the start to finish.
Summary: What you do to others will come back to you.
Year Published: 2010
Recommend? Yes
The Boogeyman - Stephen King
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Me after reading this: See this is EXACTLY why you should only read two or max. three good horror stories a year. Anymore and you'll have trouble sleeping at night. The protagonist is a father of three deceased children who comes in for his first session at the therapist. He informs the therapist that he is guilty of killing his own children, hasn't been imprisoned yet and just wants to get it out of his system. This story is a rollercoaster ride of horror and creepiness. There are a number of theories of how one could interpret the ending but it depends on if you believe in the paranormal.
Summary: Dismiss children's distress at your own risk.
Year Published: 1973
Recommend? Yes. Read it in broad daylight though.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro - Ernest Hemingway
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Our protagonist, Harry, is a man with an injured leg somewhere in the wilderness of Tanzania waiting for a rescue plane to escort him for medical treatment. The injury is a bacterial infection that is spreading quickly from a small cut and has the protagonist convinced that his time has come. With this realization comes the usual mix bag of emotion — reminiscing about old lovers, places lived, past adventures and unfulfilled potential. It's Hemingway so you know he's gonna casually drop some bars here and there. I really liked the poetic prose around the story's close.
Summary: An injured man remembers his past life as bacterial infection spreads rapidly through his body.
Year Published: 1936
Recommend? Yes
The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges
⭐⭐⭐
Is it even a Borges story if it doesn't start off as a dry, semi-autobiographical account that morphs into a metaphysical discussion? There is a Chinese spy working for Germany in WW1 on the lookout for a sinologist. During the meeting, the sinologist reveals that the spy's ancestors created a novel and a labyrinth where multiple timelines are possible. I've read Carlo Rovelli so the big idea in here was not new to me. I did like the way he spin a whole espionage story around philosophical discourse about the nature of time.
Summary: Time is not linear.
Year Published: 1941
Recommend? Yes
Nightfall - Issac Asimov
⭐⭐
Considered by many to be the story that made him popular, this one failed to land with me. I even tried going back and reading it a second time. Nope. Couldn't keep up beyond a few pages. Supposedly a group of scientists on a distant planet discover that their planet is about to experience a nightfall episode, something that happens every 2049 years. Since the planet has never experienced night or darkness before due to the presence of several suns bathing it in light, they worry that the incident would drive people insane. Here's some themes you can anticipate: the relation between scientific explanation of an event versus religious beliefs, the limits of human perception and the dangers of mass hysteria. There might be more but I wouldn't know.
Summary: That humans realize they occupy a small space in an otherwise vast and mysterious universe and whether this knowledge would drive them to wonder or despair.
Year Published: 1941
Recommend? No
Teesra Admi - Shaukat Siddiqui
⭐⭐⭐
We're in a fictional town in India where a wealthy factory owner and his henchmen are trying to solve the problem of labor shortage by allocating the least amount of capital. The town in question is built next to a river making the soil very fertile. More people choose farming as their livelihood than working as a day laborer. When the henchmen can't solve the problem, they decide to blow up the dam built on the river. Their thinking was that the subsequent damage to crops and livestock would force the people to work at the factory.
Sounds like it could've worked but once the dam is destroyed, the federal government and intelligence agency get involved. It doesn't take long for them to piece two and two together and then it becomes a game of who will rat out who. There are no good characters in this one. Just people choosing who to side with in a dog-eats-dog world.
Summary: Up close and cozy with how corruption and exploitation works.
Year Published: 1952
Recommend? Yes
For Esmé — with Love and Squalor - J.D. Salinger
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A young girl named Esmé meets the protagonist, an American soldier, in a teashop in the mid 1940s. She is an orphan, smart beyond her age and goes up to the man to strike a conversation. When the soldier explains that he likes to writes short stories, Esmé asks him if he could write her one.
The first half of the story is quite compelling, thanks in part to Salinger's prose and in part to the entertaining exchange happening in the tearoom. The second half follows the soldier's time stationed in Bavaria after that meeting. Like some of Salinger's other works, this is another post-war story but one where the sequence of events are imbued with a dream-like quality.
Summary: About a memorable encounter between a soldier and a precocious girl.
Year Published: 1950
Recommend? Yes
Kino - Haruki Murakami
⭐⭐⭐
Kino is a guy who walks in on his wife sleeping with another man. That incident turns his life upside down making him quit his job, move to another city and open a bar. In one way his decisions sound very pragmatic but what is missing is the very human, very natural, gargantuan anger outburst that one would expect from someone in his situation. Kino's problem is not processing his latent emotions in full force and keeping them under wraps. Murakami uses his usual surrealistic style to examine feelings of denial, hurt and escapism. Good read but a bit slow for my taste and not as captivating as the Birthday Girl story.
Summary: Throw the stoicism out of the window and feel the hurt deeply once and for all before it eats you from the inside.
Year Published: 2014
Recommend? Yes
The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang
⭐
This story sucked major ass! It was so long and tedious that at one point I started listening to an instrumental in the background while reading the novella. The protagonist, Ana, is a zookeeper turned AI trainer who works at a company that designs 'digients' - digital pets that can be trained. These pets are trainable like toddlers and real life pets and can develop personalities and cognitive abilities over the years.
Eventually the startup goes bust and the digients become a niche toy and their owners mingle over chat forums. The problem is that over the years, more advanced version of digients are created by other companies and the owners of the digients hope for developers to make improvements to their old but beloved pets. What they're missing is funding.
An investor meets with Ana and her animator friend working previously at the defunct startup and offers funding in trade for revamping these digients as sex robots with the all-too-predictable pitch: "digient sex will be considered as valid form of sexuality". It sounded like Chiang was trying to float the idea that if one can have non-sexual feelings for digital pets where the feelings are real and mutual, why can't we say the same for sexual feelings? He even asserts that people are opposed to zoophilia because of "personal distaste" and not because it is repugnant based on moral and religious grounds. I kinda felt like hurling my device at the wall at this point.
Maybe Chiang was trying to question the responsibility humans have for their technological creations but all it left me with was jokingly exclaim that maybe the original sin was us trying to anthropomorphize robots when the most perfect robot would look something like Interstellar's TARS.
Summary: Digital pets reused in the sex software business and questions about these machines having "choice" in the race for building the new "sexual frontier".
Year Published: 2010
Recommend? Good grief, no!
Pickman’s Model - H.P. Lovecraft
⭐⭐
There's something about Lovecraftian horror that feels very melodramatic. I prefer Daphne du Maurier's style of horror where the suspense and uncertainty has you on the edge all the time. I even checked as to why certain kind of prose has me rolling my eyes and discovered that there is a term for it, purple prose.
Anyway back to the review: the narrator, Thurber, is describing the works of a brilliant but eccentric Bostonian painter named Pickman. The artist is known for his disturbing portrayals of ghouls and other sinister beings in vivid detail. The narrator visits Pickman in his studio which prompts him to stop associating with him. Most of the story is around depictions of what the narrator sees in the studio where the further he moves the darker the paintings become.
Summary: Sometimes reality is more interesting to draw inspiration from than imagination.
Year Published: 1927
Recommend? No
Cripes Does Anybody Remember Google People - qntm
⭐⭐⭐
A bunch of people are chatting online about logging back into a social media account that was not in use for a number of years. The only problem is that there was a bot posting from the same account to keep it going during that time and now there is a weird clash between human vs. bot posting. When the actual person posts something the bot tries to copy it but gets it wrong. I don't know about Google People but it sounded awfully similar to another social media site that is still around.
Summary: What happens when someone who hasn't used their social media account for a long time logs back in and finds out there's a bot impersonating them?
Year Published: 2022
Recommend? No. Read Lena
The Lame Shall Enter First - Flannery O’Connor
⭐⭐⭐⭐
This was a devastating read. Sheppard is a widowed father who volunteers as a counsellor at the local reformatory. He spots a teenage boy, Johnson, with a very high IQ and wants to help him make something of himself. His intentions are partly driven by a savior impulse and partly because he thinks his son is going to become more of a money-obsessed type when he grows up.
Sheppard brings the boy home and offers him a shelter under his roof. But Johnson's rough childhood and fundamentalist religious education has made him very defensive towards anyone who tries to be nice to him. It almost feels like a case of nature versus nature. Then you remember it's O'Connor and that she has a tendency to come up with a twisted ending.
Summary: Charity begins at home.
Year Published: 1965
Recommend? Yes
The Thing In The Forest - A.S. Byatt
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Sometimes there comes a story that makes you feel like you are Lucy in Narnia; that you stepped through a wardrobe and are suddenly walking around in the author's magical world. You know it's imaginary but it's so well-made and cohesive that you want to see where it would lead. That's how I felt reading this. Two young girls, Penny and Primrose, meet on a train that is transporting them to safety in the English countryside during WW2. There's a forest located right next to the estate where the evacuee children are housed and the girls decide to take a little trip out of curiosity. They encounter a mysterious monster there and hurry back.
Time passes, the girls go back to their families and years later they meet again. Discussion ensues and they talk about the thing in the forest again. The story has a very fairytale-like quality to it in the first half and the author deftly brings back the readers to reality so that by the end it's a very different story.
Summary: Different people deal with childhood trauma differently.
Year Published: 2003
Recommend? Yes
Barn Burning - William Faulkner
⭐⭐
Sarty is a young boy whose father has a habit of burning his landlord's barns when he feels wronged. The family moves from one county to another, thanks to his father's terrible behavior that does not improve over time. Eventually Sarty has to make a choice: cover up for your dad or be estranged from your family forever. Sorry to disappoint Faulkner-heads but this is precisely the kind of dated-writing style I avoid.
Summary: Choosing between loyalty to your in-group versus moral justice.
Year Published: 1939
Recommend? No
A Bit On The Side - William Trevor
⭐⭐⭐⭐
For a first time reader, I really liked William Trevor's writing style. His words have this simple, unassuming quality making it feel like a skilled knives man prodding away layers and layers around his characters with dexterity and poise. The story is about two people having an affair; the man is married with family and the woman has recently come out of a divorce. If you're looking for drama or scandal, you'll be disappointed because there is none. It's more focused on conveying the emotions between two characters through unspoken words rather than long, drawn-out scenes.
Summary: Two people having an affair sit down to have a talk.
Year Published: 2004
Recommend? Yes
Master And Man - Leo Tolstoy
⭐⭐
We have Vasili who is a Russian landowner and is on his way to a business deal accompanied by his servant, Nikita. Having severely misjudged the weather, he soon finds himself in the middle of a blizzard. You know when you're about to head out and lots of small things start going awry. You start wondering if it's a good idea to reach the destination or call it quits.
Vasili's problem is sunk-cost fallacy. With the blizzard showing no signs of slowing down, a horse and a servant whose lives are now in danger, he is forced to face his poor decision-making. There is some commentary on the contrasts between how Vasili and Nikita behave in a crisis, the former being i-pay-you-so-you-serve-me type and the latter treating all parties involved as equal. Ultimately the fateful journey erodes Vasili's entitlement.
Why I didn't enjoy reading it: too long, too dense. It's not the archaic language that's solely to blame. I've read other 19th century authors like Charlotte Gilman, Herman Melville etc. for leisure so I do think Tolstoy and I don't jibe very well.
Summary: Everybody gangsta until you're caught in an unforgiving snowstorm.
Year Published: 1895
Recommend? No
The Pit And The Pendulum - Edgar Allen Poe
⭐⭐⭐
No matter how bad of a day you're having, Poe's protagonists are having it worse. Our guy is a prisoner in a pitch black dungeon who has been sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition. There's a pit in the center of his cell and a pendulum slowly descending on him from the top. As if all this wasn't enough, the walls are heated and begin to close in on him.
In a morbid sense, it becomes a game of how much longer can you keep your wits about you before you start screaming. George Orwell did this well in the final chapters of 1984. Poe isn't known to be particularly sympathetic to his main characters so you're not sure if the guy is gonna make it or perish.
Summary: How much psychological horror can you take before you break?
Year Published: 1842
Recommend? Yes
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
⭐⭐⭐⭐
I always have this feeling of premonition when reading Carver but he almost always ends the story before the climax so you never know if that tension dissolves or morphs into something apocalyptic. In this story, there are two couples socializing over drinks and the topic turns to love. The people take it in turns to describe their idea of it. As the evening goes on, everyone gets more and more drunk. I've complimented Carver before on his signature minimalist prose and this one is no exception.
Summary: A group of increasingly drunk friends discuss love over drinks.
Year Published: 1981
Recommend? Yes
The Grotesques - Sarah Hall
⭐⭐⭐
I kinda had to sit with this one for a bit because it felt like there were too many parallel themes vying for my attention. Dilly is a girl running errands on her birthday. She is running late for the evening party where her mother is making her meet someone who is gonna hire her for a job. Dilly is socially stunted but not evil and feels like she's lived a big chunk of her life under her controlling mother. A little bit all over the place but still a good read in noticing subtle differences in between the wealthy and the homeless.
Summary: A commentary on the class gap between the privileged and the homeless in a wealthy college town.
Year Published: 2020
Recommend? Yes
An Abduction - Tessa Hadley
⭐⭐⭐
Jane is a 15 yr old who is hanging out outside her house when a couple of boys in a car ask her if she wants to join them. Young and naive but compelled by the lure of adventure, she concedes. I really liked Hadley's description of the young, innocent excitement of going on an adventure. For a moment, you think you're in a Jesse McCartney music video and are hanging out with some newly-made friends. Reality, however, is often mundane.
Summary: A teenager is convinced her life is about to transition from naivete to knowledge.
Year Published: 2012
Recommend? Yes
Real Women Have Bodies - Carmen Maria Machado
⭐⭐⭐
A girl working at an apparel store finds out a perplexing secret: the dresses that are delivered to the store have a twisted manufacturing process and is somehow related to the phenomenon of women slowly losing their bodies and becoming like a translucent, shimmer-like creature. Not one to sit on the sidelines, she rebels against it to save them and also her lover. I've read enough of Machado now that I'm familiar with her storytelling style. If it's your first time reading her, I would recommend starting out with The Husband Stitch.
Summary: A shop girl finds out that women in her city are quite literally fading till they lose their bodies.
Year Published: 2017
Recommend? Yes
Area woman asks if it was worth it
Oh it was :) All of it. Should you ever wish to try something similar, I recommend starting with a smaller number, maybe 120 stories in a 12-month span. Don't aim for 200 like I did. That was me playing on hard mode. For a more concise view of stories I read and the ratings I gave them, take a look at this spreadsheet.
I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge those who recommended these stories to me. Thank you! you know who you are and thank YOU, dear reader, for following along. It means a lot to me. Keep an eye out on the shorter Part 2 of this post where I'll cover some general observations and reflections around the Short Story Project.
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