by Charlie
The Great Apes feasted for the traditional holiday meeting at Clark’s beautiful home with an amazing paella, Spanish wines and some wonderful contributed side dishes. This combined November/December meeting was for a slightly different literary fare.
The reading selection went like this: pick any short story collection that you have previously read or read something new, at the holiday dinner each member will give a review of their selection and allow brief comments on that book and author, and the finale would be a discussion of the short story as a literary form.
Perhaps a complex agenda given the warm and friendly atmosphere, plentiful food and wine, but it went swimmingly. The attendees presented with passion and enthusiasm an incredible diversity of great authors in a concise and engaging delivery.
Some were old favorites, some familiar, some new and enticing.
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
- The Nick Adams Stories by Ernest Hemmingway
- Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver
- Everything That Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor
- Shadows On The Grass by Izak Dinesen (Karen Von Blixen)
- You Like It Darker by Stephen King
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- Table For Two by Anmor Towles
(If I’ve missed some
of your choices please let us know the titles).
And what of the short story? Consensus was that the short story is an important form of literature, but opinions as a reading preference varied. Comments in praise of the short story included the concise and succinct delivery of a theme, the skill required to boil a story down to such a short format, the chance to look into the author soul through the author’s unembellished design, the opportunity of the author to reveal important themes in one or multiple stories without the need to create a plot thread, and maybe most importantly it gives the reader a completed bite to read before sleep at night or during lunch.
Detracting from the short story comments included the lack of satisfaction provided by the long series of plot twists and turns of the novel, the depth and detail of a good biography or nonfiction treatise, the comfort of settling into and living the time and place of a longer story, and the Hitchcockian suddenness of existence and unresolved ending.
Other general comments pointed out that life is more like a loosely connected series of short stories rather than a well stitched whole and that the sudden impact of a short story creates a more contemplative imperative at it’s conclusion.
