Even when I'm not reading as much as normal, it's hard to resist the pull of a short book. They're the perfect thing to jump start your reading. Here are three that I recently read.
Publisher: Dorothy, a publishing project. 2015.
Genre: Short Stories
Source: Independent Bookstore
Pages: 120
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My daughter has made her first sacrifice to fashion. She has bought a short pink skirt with lace, which does not suit her and for which there is no suitable season or occasion. It will remain unworn, but beautiful. When she wears it, it stops being beautiful. When she takes it off, there it is, beautiful again. For this, she has given up her money.
This book engaged me like no other book could one day when I was up in the middle of nowhere with a stack of books to keep my company. I was slumping hard, but once I started this collection of vignettes, I couldn't stop. The packaging itself is stunning, the book almost square, and the words inside are also beautiful. It was one of those reads where I could tell that what I was reading was beautiful and fascinating, but I also felt not completely smart enough to get all of it. Each story takes you deep into the head of a woman (sometimes different, sometimes the same as an earlier story as far as I could tell). For the most part, we get to observe small moments but overall are given powerful insight into things like love, loss, being a person, etc. Walsh's minimalism was so elegant, I could hardly handle it. I was greatly moved by a number of these stories.
Publisher: Tilted Axis Press. Oct. 3, 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend
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Yeah, like me, I said, and then it hit me. I looked down at my feet, and sensed something odd about the way they were outlined, against the pine cones and white oak leaves splayed over soft soil. My shadow, spread out thin, very thin, stretched out from the little toe of my right foot all the way into the thickets.
Even though I give both this and Vertigo four stars, I liked this book better. If you like your novellas in translation with a hint of creepy magical realism, this is the one for you. Set in a slum electronics market in South Korea, a girl starts to notice that her shadow is rising. Other people gradually notice the same thing, their shadows becoming their own quiet, autonomous entities. But what does it mean?? All of the relationships between the characters are so interesting. Hwang Jungeun's writing is very subtle and the strange tale was completely riveting. Jung Yewon did a fantastic job translating this novella into stark, atmospheric English. Han Kang (author of The Vegetarian) is giving this book publicity, and I have to say that I liked it more than The Vegetarian. Not that it's a contest. This is a strange, gently unsettling novella that gave me all sorts of feelings.
Publisher: Melville House. August 2016.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Source: Friend
Pages: 208
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It is impossible to tell apart the animals.
I wanted to like this novella a lot more than I did. Despite being over 200 pages, The Subsidiary took around 20 minutes to read max. That's because each page is no more than a sentence. We've got an experimental format on our hands!! Our main character is an office worker trapped in his building when there's a mysterious power outage. The gimmick? He's writing the book using stamps. So, visually, this book is quite stunning. The story gets a little bit dark, a little bit absurdist. Some weird shit goes down in this Latin American subsidiary office. A lot is unexplained: all of the workers seem to be disabled, there's a child there (??), there's some weird sex stuff. So it seems as if none of us, the readers nor the characters, know fully what's going on. And that's totally fine with me. There just wasn't enough substance to carry the gimmick, in my opinion.
Would you check out any of these quick reads? Have one to suggest?