The Side Effects of Endorphins

Given the number of quality unread books on the planet, I don’t spend much time reading a book repeatedly. For some people the familiarity and predictability is comforting. That is not in my genetic makeup. I can’t usually listen to the same album twice in a week.

One book I have read often is George Saunders A Swim in A Pond in the Rain.

Short Story Format

I love this short story format. This book contains 10 Russian short stories, various authors, including some of my all-time favorites. The matter in which the author introduces these stories is warm and intriguing. For example, He takes Chekhov’s “In the Cart”, for instance, literally one page at a time, interrupting the text with his interrogations. Now, what do you know? And now? And what are you curious about? 

It makes one think about their own writing and story telling. I remember listening to the story with my wife while we’re driving to Seattle on a cold night, but I was transported to that cart and listening to that story is etched in my memory.

The stories discussed in the book include

• Anton Chekhov
  • “In the Cart” (1897)
  • “The Darling” (1899)
  • “Gooseberries” (1898)
• Leo Tolstoy
  • “Master and Man” (1895)
  • “Alyosha the Pot” (1905)
• Ivan Turgenev
  • “The Singers” (from A Sportsman’s Sketches, 1852)
• Nikolai Gogol
  • “The Nose” (1836) 

Alyosha The Pot is one of my all-time favorite stories. The Singers recently had a short film adaptation that won an academy award this year. It was stunning. I would watch that movie over and over again as well.

Moving

This has been a hectic period for us. We purged many books and took them to Goodwill. Yesterday I found a pocket version of short stories and my wife threw it on the Goodwill pile.

I took it off the pile and put it in my back pocket.

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