Skip to main content

The 365 short stories challenge

As I mentioned in my New Year’s Day message (see previous post), I am starting a personal challenge to read one short story per day for the duration of the year 2010.
This challenge arose out of two things:
  1. While surfing the net for literary blogs some time last year I came across a blog dedicated to a short story reading challenge and thought "this could be something for me!"
  2. I was looking at my bookshelves recently and realised I have several big, thick short story anthologies that I have never even opened, and several more I have read a few stories from but no more.
Most of the books are themed and only a few contain stories by a single author. Since most are anthologies, and anthologies tend to be long and not really meant to be read straight through like single author short story collections sometimes are, I decided to have several books on the go so I could choose the theme that appeals to me most at any given time. I also decided to include fairy tales in the mix, to increase the number of choices.

Once I have read them I will list the stories in the sidebar, below a list of the books (below the blog archive links). I have put in abbreviations of the book titles in front of the titles in the list and will indicate which book a story comes from in the story list by those abbreviations. For example, Great Short Stories of the World will be shortened to GSSW, and The Trials of Rumpole will be shortened to TR, and so on. I am listing year published and publisher for those interested in finding these books. I have no plans right now to review any of the stories, but I will mention any that I especially like and if I come across a particularly good one I may review it.

Not listed are a number of Icelandic literary magazines that publish short stories.

In addition to those books I have listed, I seem to have misplaced one big fairy tale collection, one book by Alice Munro and one by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe (most of which I have read anyway), and a collection of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories. There may be more, but I didn’t find them on my trawl through my bookshelves. I will add them and their abbreviations as I find them.

All of the books qualify for the TBR challenge and I will finish at least the short ones in the course of the year. The short stories I read for the challenge will always be new to me, although I expect I will take the opportunity to re-read some of my favourites as well.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...
Post a Comment
Read more