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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.
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