A few weeks ago, for a quid, I got a copy of “Great British Short Stories” introduced by – but not selected by – JB Priestley. Published in 1970ish, it has 27 short stories (some 900 words, some maybe 5,000 or so) from, well, British, people. About three quarters of the men, as you’d expect.
The normal fate of such a collection is to sit on a shelf, at first glaring at me and and saying “you brought me home, you said you cared about me...” and then slowly giving up hope and being disturbed from its slumber years later. But not this time! I set myself to read – and blog – one a day.
So far, so pretty good, both in the stories (mostly 10/10, occasionally an 8, but chacun son goo and all that) and in the reading and blogging. I missed one day of reading, but caught up, and a couple of times recently I was behind not in my entries onto the gdrive page but in the posting onto this website. Old Marc would have used the lapses to re-tell convenient narratives of the Impossibility of Regularity and the Sensible-ness of Declaring Defeat. New Marc got back on the horse, but is aware that Old Marc will be lurking for a while (decades) yet.
The Len Deighton one I just read was a revelation (I thought he just did spies), and I’ve learned words/had to look things up throughout, while also enjoying myself for a few minutes every day while we wait for the apocalypse to properly begin.
I plan to keep going with the daily ritual thing after this – Kipling’s Just So Stories, an Isaac Asimov collection etc. I could read 365 short stories a year, if I kept this up…
marchudson.net 
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