Reading on a Rainy Day

It is the middle of the night, a dark, moonless night, when a man -- a small man who, though past forty, has never been as fit as he is now, his days filled with running and the endless lifting of makeshift weights -- removes a painting from the lobby wall. Having recently lost his wife in a horrible accident, Zhang Feng-qi tries to bring up his sons as best as he can, but he is not his wife - he cannot maintain his condo as well as his wife did, nor can he properly answer his two sons, Simon and Wesley, when they insist that their mother will come back. He wonders if his new girlfriend can step in, but knows it is too early to introduce her to the family. He asks his American mother-in-law to help, but she was never supportive of her daughter's marriage so her response isn't that forthcoming. Eventually, he asks his father for help. While the Zhang household is dealing with its own situation, their neighbors are having their own problems - a painter mourns the absence ...

With the Hunger Games hype that engulfed us last week, it was hard to avoid all the discussion of similar works that existed. Of the many titles that I came across, two stood out particularly - a short story called The Lottery  and a Japanese novel (and movie) called Battle Royale (which I'm reading right now and just cannot put down). The novel will be fodder for another post, so for now, I just want to rave about the awesomeness that was The Lottery . In contemporary America, villagers across the country are gathering on the 27th of June (and some a day earlier) for an annual event called the Lottery. Children, women, men, all come to the main square of their village or town, where the lottery master keeps a black box full of paper chips. One of these chips is marked has a special mark on it to identify the winner (the person who draws that chip). Not everyone draws however, but only the head of the family. Husbands are viewed as the head of their families/households, and...

It's been a while since I read a short story. Today morning, I picked Anne Enright's  In the Bed Department , mostly because of the title, which I felt quite amusing, but also because I have been seeing Anne Enright's books a lot lately, ever since The Forgotten Waltz was published last year. In the Bed Department is a story about Kitty, a 40+ year old woman who worked in the bed department (there goes the bed reference) at a store. When the story begins, a pair of escalators had just been installed at the store, and she isn't too happy about it. Initially, it was the filthy and smiling men who built the escalator that bothered her. Sometimes she could be talking about beds and springs to a couple looking to buy one, when a dirty-looking worker passed in front of them, adjusting his zip. When the construction was over, the escalator itself troubled her - its ceaseless ticking and rhythmic movements dizzied her and she kept imagining a chain underneath the escala...

Last night, I picked Kazuo Ishiguro's A Village After Dark at random. Ishiguro's other works are a lot more popular, especially his Never Let Me Go , which I still see on someone's blog every month. Because of all the hype, it could be a while before I read the book, but I saw the story as a chance to sample his writing. When A Village After Dark begins, an old man named Fletcher is navigating his way through the streets of a village in England, trying to find something that jogs his memory. The village used to be like home to him once, in days of his youth, when he was also a very popular figure in the area. He used to give speeches and get people inspired to do something and work towards a common goal. But it is never mentioned what exactly the nature of his talks were - were they political, religious, or social? When he finally arrives at a door, he decides to knock, just in case it is someone who recognizes him . At the same time, a young girl who had pursued him ...

I did something today morning that I am incredibly proud of; something that had humbled me once, the first time I tried it; something that I publicly claimed not to be interested in but was secretly very envious of all who had done it. I read a Salman Rushdie piece. Not an entire book - that's still a challenge, but a short story - In the South . And I have to say - he is not an intimidating writer at all; contrary to all my expectations, I actually enjoyed this story and loved the cleverness of his prose! The first Salman Rushdie piece I had ever tried was his Midnight Children - a book that basically left my gray and white matters in tatters. Needless to say, I didn't even finished the book, bruised as I was. That was about seven years ago. Lately, I have been meaning to revisit his works, just in case I have grown up. His story, In the South , was recently in the news when Booktrack released a digital version of this story, complete with soundtracks. In the South fe...

Continuing my desire to read more short works by authors on my must-read list but who somehow never seem to move up from there, this week I chose a short story from V. S. Naipaul's book, Half a Life . I know Naipaul has many fans and haters - his public comments tend to drive readers to polar camps, and whatever I think of the man he is, I do want to read his books. And since I came across one of his short stories at The New Yorker , I decided to start with that. I'll say right upfront that I wouldn't exactly recommend this piece, simply because it is a chapter from a novel, than a standalone story, although I should say it functions somewhat decently as a single story. I did however sense the lack of an ending or a closure when I finished the story, which is what prompted me to go looking for information about it. The book, Half a Life , from which Bohemia has been shared, is a story of an Indian guy going to study in London - initially as someone very passive abo...

I woke up today, excited about the short hour before my usual Saturday morning workout. I usually use that time to read a short story, whichever caught my fancy. Sometimes, I usually had a story decided in advance, but today I didn't really know which to read except that I planned to hound The New Yorker for a good one. (On a side note, The New Yorker is fast becoming my favorite literary stop, and I've been playing with the idea of buying a subscription.) I eventually decided to read The Shawl by Louise Erdrich, an author I haven't read yet, but who comes highly recommended. After reading this story, I'll have to join that bandwagon. The Shawl starts with the story of an Anishinaabeg mother of two young kids, who just gave birth to a baby whose father is a man that is not her husband. Her depression and bad temper eventually make her husband send her to live with the other man. Except, a tragedy strikes the wagon they travel in. Wolves attack them and their ...

I first read Jhumpa Lahiri years ago, when her Interpreter of Maladies was making a huge buzz. At the time, I didn't catch any of the buzz, but for some reason, when I saw the book on the shelf at the store I was browsing in, I felt it just might be a decent read. Funnily, I read the entire short story collection without complaining about it, but for some reason, I cannot read any collection anymore without agonizing over its disjoint nature. I did enjoy Interpreter of Maladies , but I did get bothered by the thread of loneliness and infidelity and distrust that laced through the stories. For that reason, I have been reluctant to read Unaccustomed Earth . However, when I came across Hell-Heaven at the NewYorker - a free short story from her book, I decided to go ahead and read it. I can't resist the pull of stories set in India or featuring Indian characters, and it is that same aspect that hooked me throughout this story. In Hell-Heaven , the narrator contemplates ...

Charlotte Gilman's  The Yellow Wallpaper is a work I have seen on and off on many blogs and websites but never really got to read until now. Mental illness is a topic that I tend to gravitate towards reading about, so when I finally finished reading this short story, I wasn't disappointed. The woman in the story is suffering from a mental illness that her physician husband has diagnosed as temporary nervous depression. He doesn't listen to her suggestions or wishes but instead forces his opinions on her. She believed that working, socializing and writing would help her recover faster, but her husband worried that those activities would stimulate and excite her condition unfavorably. He therefore takes her to a summer mansion and keeps her in an airy upstairs room, and persuades her to stick to a rest treatment, in hopes of curing her. Over the next three months, we get to see the effect of this treatment on her, through her journal entries that she writes in secret. ...

Title : Say You're One of Them Author : Uwem Akpan Genre : Short Stories First Published : June 2008 Publisher : Little, Brown and Company Source : Library Challenges : 100+ Reading Challenge , A to Z Challenge , Support your Local Library Reading Challenge , Audio Book Challenge , POC Challenge 358 pages On the flap Uwem Akpan's first published short story, "An Ex-mas Feast," appeared in The New Yorker's Debut Fiction issue in 2005. The story's portrait of a family living together in a makeshift shanty in urban Kenya, and their attempts to find gifts of any kind for the impending Christmas holiday, gives a matter-of-fact reality to the most extreme circumstances--and signaled the arrival of a breathtakingly talented writer. "My Parents' Bedroom" is a Rwandan girl's account of her family's struggles to maintain a facade of normality amid unspeakable acts. In "Fattening for Gabon," a brother and sister cope with...