Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

A month or two ago I turned on NPR in the middle of a superhero-themed "Three Books" segment on NPR. I don't know why, but the paragraph-long blip on Men and Cartoons caught my attention, enough so that I went onto Amazon a couple days later to find myself a cheap used copy.

I really didn't know what to expect. Seriously - the blip told me almost nothing about the book. And I'm not really an avid short story reader. I'm not sure why I felt compelled to buy this. But I enjoyed it. I liked that when I finished I could go back and scan the titles and still remember every single story and the thoughts and emotions and atmosphere it evoked. I liked that Lethem mixed everyday with absurd or fantastical in very natural ways and in widely varying proportions in each one of his stories. I liked that he didn't write like he was trying to hard. Except for the last story. I didn't like that the book ended on my least favorite of the stories.

But I can forgive that. I'm not sure I feel wildly inspired to go read more Jonathan Lethem. Like I said, I'm just not really a short story person. I'm also not sure the book merited the powerful urge I felt to go buy it, but I'm still digesting what I read and rolling it all around in my head, so maybe it did.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allen Poe

I don’t think I’ve read anything by Edgar Allan Poe since high school. I’m not quite sure what inspired me to pick up a book of his short stories, other than that I saw it, and it seemed to fit in nicely with my reread-stuff-I-read-in-high-school project, and it wasn’t too much of a commitment when my summer life started getting busy and I started reading less.

What I remember about my high school encounters with Edgar Allan Poe was that I didn’t think he was nearly as creepy as I thought he was going to be. I think maybe I was expecting ghosts and unsolved mysteries, but instead I got . But my conclusion the second time around, with both familiar and unfamiliar stories, was different. He’s creepy. Part of the change in my perception is that I read fewer Edgar Allan Poe stories in high school than I realized. There’s a gruesome double murder in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" that, while described with police report detachment, is as gory as any prime time television crime drama, but I never read that story in high school, nor had I read "The Pit and the Pendulum" or "The Fall of the House of Usher" (this was news to me - the names are so familiar that I just took it for granted that they were part of the high school reading list).

But I also think that in high school I didn't have quite enough life experience to understand what makes the skin crawl. Edgar Allan Poe's stories, with some exceptions, don’t require blood or putrefaction or the supernatural. They are psychologically unnerving.

But not all of them. I was surprised to find out that Edgar Allan Poe wrote more than just creepy. The first story in the book was a mock newspaper article written in the spirit of speculative fiction, and another piece later in the book could only be classified as humor, a bit satiric and not in the least dark. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" read like Sherlock Holmes. Poe's fiction was a lot more diverse than I knew.

Reading the stories made me want to know more about the man who wrote them. I read the introduction to the book (something I always intend to do with classics, but rarely get around to), and a month or two after finishing the stories I got to visit the Edgar Allan Poe memorial (and his grave site) in Baltimore, the city he claimed as his home, but I can't say I know much. Still, after reading this book I feel like I know Poe a little better than I did in high school, and better understand his place in literature and history and culture.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

Other than the story or two I'm sure I read in my seven years of Spanish classes, this was my first real introduction to Borges. It's a slim volume, less than 200 pages, and most of the works are 10 pages or less, but each takes some time to read and digest, and I had to pick it up a few times over the course of several months before I could finally really get into it and just read.


Ficciones is a really nice name for this collection of short works by Jorge Luis Borges, because they are not so much short stories as "fictions." In each one, Borges takes an idea and imagines it into being and then tells it, sometimes almost academically, as if it were a fact: an infinite library containing every book that could ever possibly exist, a dreamer who very systematically dreams a new man into being, a man who wishes for an extra year of life when he steps before a firing squad and is granted it when time freezes, and he along with it while remaining entirely conscious. I especially loved the final story, "The South," which I took (rightly or wrongly) as a commentary on all that had come before, and on the relationship between fiction and reality. As I've said here before, my final impression of a book is one of my strongest impressions. As for all that had come before, however, while some of the stories baffled me, and I wouldn't call most of them emotionally resonant (Borges' style is very intellectual, and that doesn't always appeal to me), they almost all fascinated me at some level. For that I enjoyed each one of them, with very few exceptions.

Selected Stories by Anton Chekhov

In the improv class I took a couple years ago, one of our activities involved creating scenes around lines from Chekhov plays. Two people would be given some sort of theme to begin a scene and then at some unspecified point, our instructor would give a signal and we'd have to stop in the middle of our action or dialogue, pull a slip of paper from our pocket, recite the line written on that slip of paper (which we had not seen beforehand, and which was always from a Chekhov play), and figure out how to work it into the scene so that it made sense.

So, for example, you and your partner might improvising a conversation between two people standing in line at the grocery store when all of a sudden the signal sounds, and you pull a slip of paper out of your pocket and find out that your next line is: "You have found your way, you know where you're going, but I'm still drifting in a chaos of images and dreams." And suddenly you have to work that existential business into a conversation about carrots.

When our instructor first explained it to us I was dubious about using Chekhov instead of someone more contemporary, but it turned out to be one of my favorite activities. It also made me curious about Chekhov. When I was in Seattle, I stumbled across a little used bookstore where I stumbled across a book of Chekhov plays, and remembered that I was curious, and picked it up. But I don't do so well with reading plays and I never made it past page 5. Months and months later I came across a book of short stories at the BYU Bookstore and decided that this was my in.

I actually really enjoyed the stories. They're they're mostly plotless. I think we modern readers take it for granted that short stories don't necessarily have a plot, but my understanding (I may be on shaky ground here) is that Chekhov wrote at a time when stories that were more about place and character than about what happened were kind of novel. And that's what his stories are. They paint pictures of places, or of people, that are rich enough and interesting enough that you care less about what happens. It's interesting to read the stories chronologically (which is how my book was organized) and to see how he moves gradually from telling his stories as an outside observer, to really getting into the head and heart of his characters.

Chekhov isn't a total downer, but his stories aren't really happy portraits of happy people. In fact, I found some of the stories absolutely heartbreaking, particularly "The Kiss" and "Three Years." These were the stories where I think Chekhov was most adept at putting the reader into the mind and circumstances of the characters. And even in the stories that lacked the same strong empathy with the characters, I enjoyed the picture that Chekhov painted of Russia coming up on the turn of the 20th century, and how he seemed able to capture people in a wide range of life circumstances.

Overall, though I'm not much of a short story reader, I really enjoyed these stories. And I think maybe it gave me the motivation to pick up that book of plays again and give it another try.

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

I read 100 Years of Solitude several years ago. I think I understood something like 57% of what was going on over the course of the 448 pages and I was fascinated by it and I couldn't put it down and it was one of the best books I had ever read.

When I read a really good book, I usually want to seek out something else the author has written. But when I read something really transformative, I hesitate. I feel like it might disturb waters that I don't want disturbed. So it took me a long time to get back to Gabriel García Márquez, and the length of time it took was kind of on purpose. In the end, it was a Christmas gift from my brother that did it, a paperback of three novellas: "Leaf Storm," "No One Writes to the Colonel," and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold."

To say I'm glad to have gotten back to Gabriel García Márquez, and that these waters were worth disturbing, is an understatement. I think what I love about all three of these novels, and what I loved about 100 Years of Solitude, is that the storytelling is unconventional, but doesn't call attention to the unconventionality. In fact, Gabriel García Márquez's style is almost journalistic, straightforward and literal about things that are not at all literal. At the same time, the language is rich and descriptive, but rich and descriptive in a way that makes you feel like he's not really trying all that hard to be rich and descriptive.

The stories are interesting and beautifully told and unfold so gradually that you don't really know what the story is about until you reach the end. When I finished these stories, I wanted so much to talk about them afterward because there was just so much in them. Sometimes I wish books weren't such a solitary endeavor...

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

This is the third book by Jhumpa Lahiri that I have read (after her novel, The Namesake, and her collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies), and I have very little to say except that I loved this as much as I have loved everything I have read. Lahiri writes primarily about Indian-American families. She writes most often of the children of parents who have emigrated to the United States for work and education, but her characters and stories ecompass a wide range of human experience. Her prose is beautiful and simple, yet simultaneously detailed, and it opens up onto complex inner worlds.

I don't read many stories. Just as with television I am more engaged by the development of characters and story arcs over long periods of time, so too I tend to prefer a novel where I grow into and become attached to the people and to their stories. But reading Jhumpa Lahiri's book makes me feel like I want to give short stories more of a chance. Each is it's own, detailed little world, in which I get a small glimpse and then move on, but enjoy every moment.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling

I'm going to admit right here that I didn't think a whole lot about reading this book when I learned it was coming out. I didn't get excited when I saw it appear on bookstore posters, or count down the days until it hit the shelves. Harry Potter was enough for me. I loved the books, I was happy with how they ended, and I didn't feel any need to add to them.

But then around Christmastime a handful of people I knew began reading the book, and then talking about the book, and I was hearing pretty positive things. I don't know if I would have sought it out on my own eventually, but by the time a copy of the book fell into my hands, my curiosity had already been piqued.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is not a very long book - the spine is thin and the print is large. It probably took me under an hour total, reading a story at a time before bed for several nights. For those who are not in the know, the Tales are sort of like the Grimm Brothers' fairy tales of the Harry Potter world, and five stories are interspersed with commentary by Dumbledore about their historical significance, their connections to wizarding lore, and what they say about the wizard and human spirit.

You definitely have to be a Harry Potter fan to enjoy the book, but I am and I did. The stories and commentary are engaging. I think including commentary, even fictionalized commentary, the way Rowling did was a little risky. It created the possibility of closing off interpretation, and telling us what to think about the stories instead of letting us think for ourselves. But I thought Rowling handled it quite well, and the stories actually do make you think. It is still children's literature at its heart, but just as with the Harry Potter books, there is a surprising depth and darkness to the stories, that still doesn't overshadow the fact that this is also just a fun, quick read.

I imagine it must be great fun to create a world in order to tell a story, with not only characters, places, and rules, but its own culture and history, its own legends and even fairy tales. It occurred to me as I read that I'm just a little envious of J. K. Rowling.