A bonus blog for the end of the year! I will soon be posting the final Words on Words of my 2016 reading challenge; however, my December reading involved a LOT more than just the 3 books I needed to get to 50. My incredible fiancee, Angela, got me an amazing gift: the 2016 Short Story Advent Calendar! I had never even heard of the collection before, but she found it online and surprised me with it. I can’t imagine a more perfect of personal gift; thank you Angela! Created, edited, and designed by Canadians Michael Hingston and Natalie Olsen, this beautiful box set featured one individually sealed short story per day for each day in December, right up to Christmas day. The authors were a wide range of published and new writers, many of them Canadian, a few of them quite well known indeed. Each story was deliciously different in style and content. Some were wintery or Christmassy in theme, but most were just beautifully curated samples of the tremendous potential of short fiction.
25 short stories are far too many to offer full reflections on, so I have merely pulled a quotation that stood out to me from each. My 5 favourite stories are marked with a * – if you have a chance to read any of these, do not miss it! Here are the 25 short stories I read in December, and the words therein that stayed with me:
- Hunger Strike – Kevin Wilson
“I think higher education creates an atmosphere where semi-intelligent people do really fucked-up things.”
- Under the Taps: A testimonial – Anakana Schofield
“Forty years can lapse in a paragraph, where forty minutes cannot ever lapse in life.”
- Just Like Us – Vanessa Hua
“It aged you, to stay still. Like the twin paradox I’d read about. One twin rocketed at the speed of light and returned to earth younger than the twin who remained behind. Your life was set before you had a chance to figure it out.”
*4. Bestiary – Thomas Wharton
“The nineteenth-century British naturalist and mystic Joseph Whitecroft once wrote, ‘To every living thing you see, say we.’ His journals express wonder, and even a kind of spiritual dread, at what appears to most of us as the merely obvious: how every creature that is alive in the world at one time is alive now, and it is the same now.”
- Pet – Deb Olin Unferth
“She’ll always have a question no one can answer and a long list of people to ask.”
*6. Cure – Gina Ochsner
“‘That’s the trouble with seeing clearly and understanding what you saw,’ she said. ‘It stays with you.’”
*7. Deep Wells, USA – Chris Bachelder
“Literary stakes-raising gimmicks include: War; Bad Step-Parents; Cancer (some forms); Toxic Airborne Events; Infidelity; Lame Horses; Thwarted Things; Unrequited Things; Delayed Things; Mercutio’s Death; Babies in Wells; Babies in Mine Shafts; Babies in Sewer Pipes; Babies under Futons”
- Treading – Charles Demers
“And you know nine times out of ten even just a walk is the most important exercise you can do in your life.”
*9. Dream Girl – Katie Coyle
“There are different kinds of love. There’s no better than the kind that lets you look at yourself and see someone better than you are.”
- Two Minutes, Five Minutes, Ten – Manuel Gonzales
“It’s possible. Any of this is possible. None of this is written in stone. But we won’t know.”
- Crazy Life – Lou Mathews
“Right, Chuey, I think, la vida loca. The crazy life. It’s the explanation for everything on 42nd Ave.”
- Oneness Plus One – Aimee Bender
“We will go where we go together.”
- Obscure Objects – Caroline Adderson
“Then it came to me, my ending, surprising and inexorable.”
- Blue Light, Red Light – J. Robert Lennon
“Were the parents stupid? Did they believe that the light itself protected them? The boy’s fears deepened. The parents were incompetent.”
- Minus, His Heart – Jedediah Berry
“‘Is my end before me?’ the boy queried. ‘As always,’ Minus said, mistaking fear for philosophy.”
- The Heaviest Dress – Mereille Silcoff
“I thought if an old movie, where a poor street girl is transformed into a lady. She is instructed to imagine herself wearing a crown, attached to the heavens by a string, always pulling up. It was like Elainey’s string had been cut.”
- I Hate You – Daniel Handler
“Be my friend, Brad thinks, or hate me, lovers or friends, friends or strangers we’re all strangers.”
*18. A Follower of Aeromat – Sheila Heti
“Every story ever told is the story of a person who is trying to tell the truth, but cannot.”
- Baby’s On Fire – Missy Marston
“She wants to get filled up with rock and roll and walk out into the spring evening feeling like she might get lucky.”
- Defamer – Shane Jones
“Without smashing, there’s no us.”
- Circumstances of Hatred – Laura Trunkey
“Don’t worry. These men are not the first to be released.”
- At Christmas Time – Anton Chekhov
“He believed in his old woman who had brought him there, and in Yegor; and when he had mentioned the hydropathic establishment it could be seen that he believed in the establishment and the healing efficacy of water.”
- The Lunacy of Gumbo – Padgett Powell
“A man, unless he is a Frenchman, has only a couple of foods that command his attention.”
- Being Mary – Marina Endicott
“Mary Magdalene I felt I needed more worldly experience for.”
- The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle – Arthur Conan Doyle
“Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward.”
*****
Find out more at the Short Story Advent Calendar website! I hope they make one of these every year! It created a great excuse to read every single day in December, undeniably the busiest month of the year. To the creators, thank you! To my Angela, thank you for finding it! Check back soon for my final Words on Words of 2016, and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!
An Awfully Big Adventure 