Reading Short Stories, Anisha’s workbook

This is my workbook to get to know the short story form better, here will be random jots and quotes as I read.

My short story journal of my experience of reading short stories and this challenge is here.

My ShortRead log that tracks my progress in this challenge is here, message 3 gives an overview in table form, and doubles up as the Content.

           

Current read Cosmicomics, I’m not sure what to make of this, it’s kind of coming together in a vague way.

From Without Colours

At that time, sensing the changes that would tale place, obscure builders were shaping premature images of a remote, possible future.

I’m kind of warming to Cosmicomics, I’ve read 70% and am wondering if I should have first read more books on physics and space to be able to connect to it better? I kind of get the allusions to physics and space (the quote below is from a story about, I think, the curved lines in space). I am enjoying parts of this but I think I’ll like this more after I’ve read more books and read this again.

From The Forms of Space

Assuming then that one was falling, everyone fell at the same speed and acceleration ...

I've finished Cosmicomics, my comments are on my log, message 49. I've read it for 'discovery' but keeping the prompt open to read Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka. Originally, I was going to read this for 'set in space', but towards the end Qwfwf says

I look around, and whom am I looking for? She is still the one I seek; I've been in love for five hundred million years ...

to me, this sounds like a man who has discovered he has been searching for love.

Big Book of Cyberpunk Volume 1

This book (and volume 2) have been on my shelf for a while, from this one I’ve read the first 3 / 5 stories I have randomly selected from this book. The first one, The Gernsback Continuum by William Gibson, has a chilling start:

MECIFULLY, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode.

Big Book of Cyberpunk Volume 1

I've read the 5 stories, and I want to read more from this book and have added another 7. These stories are quirky, unsettling, as they explore the ‘I’ in stories that have a kind of futuristic setting, grungy, dark and yet vibrant, Blade Runner comes to mind.

The 12 are listed here under ‘quest’.

I've been wanting to read a few more by Agatha Christie and was spurred on after the mentions here.

Whenever, I read Poirot, it never fails to make me laugh, of the few that I've read I think it's his presence that makes the story. As a crime solving case The Market Basing Mystery is lightweight, but what makes it is Poirot, in one scene him, Hastings and Japp are having breakfast together, when Japp comments he could eat more and directs it to Poirot, Poirot says:

"One must not so replenish the stomach that the brain refuses to function."

it just made me laugh.

I'm half way through reading Bartleby by Herman Melville and it's the first story that is baffling. Maybe this is what I should be feeling as the narrator is also baffled by him?

>8 AnishaInkspill: One of my favorite shorts.

>9 Nonconformisto: I enjoyed reading this and I am still thinking on it as Bartleby remains a mystery to me but I do feel like I have missed something with how it ends and so I'm now reading Herman Melville's The Apple Tree Table, and really enjoying the build-up where this table seems to be haunted.

One of the interesting things I'm noticing is that there are two types of short stories, there are those that have more of a tendency to be more philosophical, the other type is where it has: a main character, a main theme and it is a 3-tier structure with a beginning-middle-end.

If I was to guess I'd say stories written before the mid-twentieth century are more likely to fit the first type than the second. I am not entirely sure but this is intriguing.

Big Book of Cyberpunk Volume 1 stories compiled by Jared Shurin

File: The Death of Designer D. by Christian Kirtchev is the 6th of the 12th story from this collection.

I am still struck, is this commentary on the impact of consumerism or a story? I was hoping reading science fiction from the 1950s and earlier might help me to see this more clearly, if this is a story than it's an unresolved mystery of a designer's death, where this story hypothesis what would have led to this leaving it for the reader to decide.

the week that's gone, I focussed on Franz Kafka and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

I'm posting soon as I get a chance the stories I've read, it was interesting to read stories by both that again do not have a beginning, middle and end and yet are parts of short story collections. How this ties into Big Book of Cyberpunk Volume 1, yeah, I'm still working on that.