It’s been a long while since I even tried to read a short story collection—I read a lot of short stories in 2003 and I daresay it burnt me out. So I was glad that Melanie sent me this Ursula Hegi collection for my birthday. A nice reminder of my appreciation of the short fiction.

Hegi is grounded in the exploration of moments, where a story can exist primarily to describe a single moment. I love when the development leads up to a final scene that delivers a simple truism. There’s a story by Ellen Gilchrist that perfectly illustrates this—of course, I read that book before I started keeping a booklog, so I’d have to dig around boxes for my old paper reading journals to even try to figure out which one it was. The interesting thing about the Gilchrist story was that I pretty much hated it up until the final scene, which was just beautiful. There’s nothing as exaggerated as that in Hegi’s stories, but most do seem to have a single scene that bestows a clearer weight than the others.

I started reading this Buddhist self-helper a couple of years ago and just wasn’t in the place for it at the time. I thought of it again suddenly this summer and felt like it would be a good time to revisit it. I tend to get into these patterns of reading where I have lists that I am trying to charge through as fast as possible—skimming and gleaning more often than immersing myself fully. So it was nice to take some time to settle into this and read slow and not think about the pile of books sitting on my bookcase. This is the sort of book you can probably always find something pertinent and useful in no matter when you read it.

I’ve always wondered how bad this book actually was.. It reads like a sad attempt to recreate To Kill a Mockingbird, except this one is set in the Civil Rights Era and topples in on itself with its didacticism. I can’t say I really cared about the characters, even the ones who weren’t as annoying as the 14-year-old white heroine. Maybe the adolescent voice is just that convincing?

I am appreciating Kafka on the Shore much more now.