The Book of Other People (2008)

Quite good. Very much of its time. Mostly not boring. ( )

There's a common consensus amongst booksellers, publishers and authors that short story anthologies don't sell nearly as well as novels. J.G. Ballard called them the "loose change in the treasury of fiction;" George Orwell thought that most modern short stories were "utterly lifeless and worthless, far more so than most novels." I've quoted Michael Chabon's perfect description on contemporary short stories so often on this blog I can't do it anymore in good consciensce.

I used to disagree with prevailing opinion, but I've read quite a few anthologies this year and I'm starting to realise I was wrong. Whether it's "Stories," "The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard," or "The Best Australian Stories 2010"... none of these books grabbed me. They all suffered from the weak links in the chain. I can count the number of short stories I have read in my entire life that I really, really enjoyed on the fingers of one hand.

I suspect I even suffer from the common bother of disliking short stories simply because, as Orwell pointed out, they're so truncated; you don't get a chance to unwind and stretch out, to really get to know the characters. The Book of Other People opens with a story by David Mitchell, my absolute favourite author of all time, yet it didn't really do anything for me. That didn't bode well for the rest of the collection, which mostly featured writers I'd never heard of.

I started reading short story anthologies in order to practice my own (a short story being a much quicker way for a young writer to achieve the validation of publication), but I think I'm getting fatigued from the constant disappointment. This is not to say that short story collections are usually bad - indeed, The Book of Other People isn't bad - but they are almost universally average and forgettable. I suppose an anthology actually subverts the purpose of a short story, which is supposed to be a quick dose of fiction, standing by itself and read in a single sitting. An anthology is an attempt to collate short stories into something more like a novel, and the stories suffer for the comparison. ( )

This is a book of short stories from different authors and covers people and their different characters. To be honest a few of the stories were good but the majority were nothing special. I felt let down to be honest by this book I was expecting a lot more to it.

This book was not done for money as it all went to charity. A good cause in the end gained from this book. But to be honest I wondered if I would have enjoyed this more if they had been paid. Might have held my interest more. ( )

I'm halfway through this and man is it good! I love short stories. I love people watching. I love 99% of these authors. It's really too good to be true, this collection.

Written mostly by well-known writers (Smith, Edwidge Danticat, David Mitchell, Jonathan Zafran Foer, ZZ Packer, Nick Hornsby, etc.), these stories are a pretty mediocre bunch overall. Each writer was asked to submit a story (well, two of them are graphic stories, I guess) about one character, and the proceeds go to a charity. Good premise. The characters and styles are diverse, but most of the stories left me flat; the best are perhaps "Frank" by A. L. Kennedy and "Donal Webster" by Colm Toibin--but they aren't exactly "uppers." A few years ago I read a similar charity collection edited by Hornsby, and that one was even less successful. (Hopefully these authors aren't donating work that hasn't been accepted elsewhere.) ( )