(Tuesday 15th September) – I ran out of time last night (15th) to post a journal entry for the day’s reading, so I guess I’ll do that first – it won’t take long:
As I want to keep every reading commitment I’m involved in progressing, yesterday was a catch up day for my 100 Shorts of Shot challenge, which right now seems to almost exclusively involve the free short story offerings from Harper Perennial’s Fifty-Two Stories website. I was sitting two stories behind, plus the one newly announced on Monday. I ticked all three of those stories off yesterday and am now up-to-date….Yay! See what one can achieve with a bit of focus?
The stories were Good Girl by Holly Goddard Jones (a gritty ‘coming to terms with the death of a wife’ type of story), The Kitchen Boy by Alaa Al Aswany ( a slightly controversial hospital tale from an equally controversial Egyptian writer), and the really short but kind of sweet If You Eat, You Never Die by Tony Romano, where the clash of language and culture is the main ingredient. I’ve already posted up afterthoughts for all three of these stories so I’m not going to say any more about them other than to point you to these individual reviews – Good Girl | The Kitchen Boy | If You Eat, You Never Die.
My other reading time yesterday (of which there wasn’t a great deal left), was dedicated to getting back into Richard Holloway’s Between the Monster and the Saint (Canongate). I had rather recklessly ‘jumped ship’ not long after starting Holloway’s explorative non-fictional work last week, in order to ‘random read’ Morris Gleitzman’s Once & Then from Penguin Books (my ‘afterthoughts’ are still be posted (shame on me) but you can catch my ‘forethoughts’ on Gleitzman’s novel HERE). Feeling guilty I restarted Between the Monster and the Saint and am fully back on board with it.
To be honest although Holloway’s writing style is very accessible, the subject matter of Between the Monster and the Saint (fundamentally exploring man’s compulsion towards evil) is a bit heavy. So although enjoyable the speed needed to fully comprehend Holloway’s concepts (at least for me), means I’m happy if I work my way through a single chapter per sitting (they are fairly long chapters). So with six in total I expect this one to take me close to a week, if I tick off a chapter per day, which I’m aiming for.
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Today
07:00 – Having not had the pleasure of his company for two weeks (already) I indulged myself with my precious Maupassant over breakfast this morning (as part of my Devouring De Maupassant challenge), and oh how absence makes the heart grow fonder! And with the feeble excuse that they were exceptionally short, I went for a double helping of Maupassant and gobbled up every morsel.
The first story, The Model, is delightful in a chilling way. After seeing the painter Jean Summer walking along the terrace promenade at Etretat, with his crippled wife being wheeled beside him, a young associate of Summer relates the tale to his friend of how the wife became crippled. You would expect love and light to be omnipresent in a Maupassant story such as this, and it is. But there’s also a degree of darkness creeping into it too.
If the first story had a dark side to it then the second – The Hand, must be considered to be a full-on ‘blackout’. I’ve said before, with regards to one of the Maupassant shorts I’ve read – Who Knows?, that it could well have been penned by Poe, and The Hand could very well make the same claim (and this was penned when Maupassant was fully in control of his faculties). The Hand tells the tale of the enigmatic and mysterious Sir John Rowell, and it reveals in full Gothic-esque horror, the reason why the man has fully-loaded pistols placed around his house. A great story from Maupassant and not what one would usually expect.
22:00 – Another chapter from Richard Holloway’s Between the Monster and the Saint (Canongate) ticked off, and actually Holloway, or rather his exploration of compulsion to evil, is beginning to become a bit easier to comprehend. One thing I have remembered while typing this though – I’ve yet to put up my ‘forethoughts’ on Between the Monster and the Saint. Thankfully I already penned my initial thoughts before diving into the reading, so they will still be pure and unqualified. I’ll get them up tomorrow.
Looking to tomorrow
As far as my reading goes tomorrow, I hope to start the day with an Edgar Allan Poe short (for my iPoe Reading Challenge), before the body of my reading time is spent on hopefully ticking off Hanna Astrup Larsen’s Knut Hamsun biography (mainly because I’m desperate to get on to Kolloen’s Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter (Yale University Press)). In the evening, back to Holloway and all being well another chapter of Between the Monster and the Saint ticked off.
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