So another reading day dissolves into the foggy haze of history, and just like Tuesday it was another day of mixed reading success. Let’s have a run through it.
The first reading task of the day was to dig into the backlog of short stories I’ve let build up from that most excellent of free short story portals, Fifty-Two Stories (which in turn helps me to take a step closer to completing my 100 Shots of Short reading challenge). Sadly however, things didn’t turn out quite as good as I’d expected.
Normally I get on really well with the short story offerings served up by Cal Morgan over at the Harper Perennial website. The mix is always fresh, exciting and definitely eclectic (which I love), but for some reason, both of the stories I read yesterday, didn’t really hit the spot. The first up, Belinda by Amity Gaige, had the makings of a good story – a woman goes through a series of unsuccessful marriages, and her relationship with each newly adopted family becomes a bigger factor than perhaps it should have been – but I just couldn’t find myself connecting with it too readily. It’s a shame because Gaige’s prose is a beauty to behold, it really is. But alas I never got any real satisfaction from Belinda. I’ve said a little more on it in my afterthoughts.
Unfortunately the second Fifty-Two Stories offering I dipped into, Cicada Cadence, Katie Didn’t by Craig Davis, wasn’t for me, much better. There’s no doubt that the story – which focuses on the teenage reminiscences of two men drinking in a bar – was well written. But as with the previous tale I just couldn’t connect with it to any great degree. And I think that’s because I found the story to be too ornate, too poetic in its prose, and often these kind of stories are a bit of a turn-off for me. Anyway, you can catch up on my afterthoughts for the story HERE, but I don’t really add a lot more.
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Thankfully, after my earlier reading disappointment, the Arthur Miller offering from my ongoing journey through Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury) was a real treat. First published in the New Yorker in 2002 The Performance follows the story of tap dancing extraordinaire Harold May, as he gives his greatest and most unexpected performance in pre-war Nazi Berlin in front of Adolf Hitler and his entourage. The story is told in retrospect to the narrator (a reporter), some fifty years later, and so the storyteller and narrator have a retrospective view both on Hitler, and the atrocities that he was privy to. The story actually ends up being rather chilling, as Miller, through his character Harold May, shows a more charismatic and alluring side to Hitler. It wasn’t done to show any support for Hitler, rather it was to suggest that this mind, so responsible for indescribable atrocity, also had a normal side to it. Like I say chilling stuff, and Miller explores the whole notion incredibly well. I loved it! Story Rating: 
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What with all of the other reading I had to do, and the blogging, I didn’t get as much time with this book as I would have wanted to yesterday. That said, I did manage to get an hour in, so progress has been made. Am I still enjoying it? Very much so. It’s beautifully written (and translated by Susan Massotty), and it just makes the whole history of the Iranian Revolution so much more accessible. It’s still too early to say much more than this for now, but I’m definitely connecting superbly well with it, both on a spiritual level and cognitively.
::Thursday’s reading plans::
- Today I’m going to get back into the driving seat with my Lorrie Moore vs. William Trevor reading challenge. So one story from each writer. The Moore short I’ve got lined up, which comes from Faber’s Lorrie Moore: The Collected Stories is entitled Go Like This. And the William Trevor short, which comes from Penguin’s William Trevor: The Collected Stories, is the rather magnificently entitled, The Introspections of of J.P. Powers.
- The next Miller short from Presence: Collected Stories, called Beavers.
- Onwards through revolutionary Iran with Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque.
So a fun reading day ahead? We’ll see. Hope you all enjoy your own reading.
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