My Short Story Love Story

Short Stories: 

My Love Story with Them...

Hello everyone! 

As you all will know by now going to school for me at least does not afford me all the time I would like to read, and this year I have come up with the perfect way to get all of the reading I want done. I will be bringing six short story collections with me to university to read between the classes and books that I will have on stack to review. My love of short stories has not always been present; when I was in high school we only read dense and difficult short fiction that I had to struggle to comprehend which created a hate for the art within me. However that is now not the case; here is how I stepped over the disdain I felt for short stories. 

As many of you have possibly encountered while in your English Literature courses as a student you are forced to analyze difficult pieces of literature of varying lengths for your course; my teacher thought it would be helpful to allow us as students to look at the very dense and intricate short stories of the late victorian era. These short works were enjoyable on a surface level dealing with a simplistic bubbly plot involving regency romances and social rhetoric; however my teacher wanted us to delve into the deeper meaning. This deeper meaning hunt often made me search for hours to find a single layer of meaning beyond plot points, which added stress and nerves to my reading experience. As a more mature and well rounded reader, now, I understand the benefit of these hours sifting word by word through a story to find its deeper meaning. This diligence and hard work pushed me to detest the works themselves for all the effort they required initially, I have now grown to relish in the hard work these stories demand to comprehend completely. 

With a general love for fiction and the difficult short stories I had been forced to read in my literature courses I decided to jump into a short fiction course in university this past semester. In this course we were asked to look at the many short works bound together in a hefty anthology, and even give presentations on a few of the short works we read. This difficult course pushed me even more with my journey to understand the written word on a deeper level within the few pages that each author wrote. I will not say that this course was always fun or easy because authors such as Melville, and Faulkner were focussed on throughout the course. The new found respect for short fiction will be put to the test during this upcoming school year, 2016-17, when I will be supplementing my reading between classes with short story collections instead of the traditional novels. 

I will be bringing the following Short Story collections with me to University this fall: 

• Sea Lovers by:Valerie Martin
• Pretty Monsters by: Kelly Link
• Fen by: Daisy Johnson
• Prodigals by: Greg Jackson
• Central Station by: Lavie Tidhar
• St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves by: Karen Russell

I chose these by filming the Try A Story Tag which I was Tagged in by Erik Karl Anderson of Lonesomereader.com; it was adapted to this version from the Try A Chapter Tag by Jen Campbell on YouTube! This was incredibly important for me to do in order to choose the collections that I would be bringing to university with me...

I have linked both, Erik's video for you all to view. I will link Jen Campbell's video in my description as soon as the video is live on YouTube! So please check back regularly to see when this Tag video goes live on my channel!