Because sometimes a novel is just too much of a commitment.

After slogging my way through the Hell - oh yes, capital "H" definitely needed - that was my students' papers on The Great Gatsby (favorite line: "Time is passing by so it Daisy"), I find myself unable to read with concentration anything much more intense than the back of the cereal box. Actually, revise that down to the back of a toothpaste box. We're talking seriously interrupted brain function. Since starting a new novel would have failed miserably, I decided to start working my way through Best American Short Stories 2006. I do always feel like I've sold out to The Man a little bit when I read this series. But, let's face it, I'm not conscientious or wealthy enough to actually subscribe to all the literary journals that I'd really like to read, and since it's hard to take a gamble on an entire volume of short stories by someone you've never heard of, BASS it is.

So far, I've read the first five short stories, two of which have entranced me, two of which have bored me, and one of which I'm still on the fence about. Since it's mean to bash authors who probably just bored me out of some freakish alignment of the stars, especially since I haven't read enough else by them to fairly assess my response, I won't talk about the boring ones (ahem, Tobias Wolff and Maxine Swann). But I absolutely fell in love with the story by Paul Yoon ("Once the Shore") and the story by Mark Slouka ("Dominion"). According to the nice little bio in the back of the book, "Once the Shore" was Paul Yoon's first published story. See, why did you have to go and make me jealous like that, Paul? Here I am, ready to extol the virtues of your lyrical little dewdrop of a story, and instead you have to rub it in my face that even if I do eventually get something of mine published, it probably won't be as good as the first short story YOU published. Oh, the tragedy. Anyway, I loved it. If you can find it anywhere (it was originally published in One Story), you should read it.

"Dominion" was also one of those stories that sucks you in deep and refuses to relinquish its hold on you even after you've put the book down ... I was also pleasantly surprised to be reading about an elderly character that I could actually identify with. So much of the time, authors portray the eldery as either childlike or wise or senile, and it's rare to find a portrait of a man nearing death written with such relevance to all generations.

I'm hoping to read a little more tonight - perhaps I'll update again soon.