"The Devil You Know is Better Than the Devil You Don't"

For a while during my morning commute, I used to listen to multiple different podcasts of short stories. There was This American Life, Selected Shorts through PRI, and my personal favorite, the New Yorker Fiction. In this podcast, authors are invited to select a story from the magazine's archives and read it. Then the author and host would have a discussion about the story after the reading was done.

What I learned from listening to these podcasts (and also as anyone who has written a short story has probably learned) is that, with much less real estate to convey a complete narrative, every word in a short story is deliberate and needs to pack a punch. Given that my free subscription to satellite radio just ran out last week, I suspect it's time for me to get back on board with listening to my short story podcasts. There's a lot to be appreciated about an excellently written short story. And holy crap does Flannery O'Connor do this masterfully.

The actual book of A Good Man is Hard to Find consists of 10 different short stories. And after having read through them all together, there is a vein of similarities across the stories. They're all set in the south (usually Georgia) in roughly the 1940's, and all tend to have 1 character who is strong-willed, a bit of a know-it-all, often smug, and usually also cynical about religion and belief in God. These characters don't usually meet a very good end. There is a very dark, sinister, and often tragic theme that permeates the stories; as innocuous as they start out, there is often a very disturbing turn the story takes, which startled me on many occassions. The title story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, is the first story presented in the book, and needless to say, I didn't expect the crotchety Grandma, bratty kids, and ambivalent parents to meet an unfortunate end at the hands of an escaped convict. Nor did I expect a small boy to drown himself in a river in the next story. I know, heavy duty right?

But the thing about these flawed characters is that they usually come to a realization about the misguided views they've held, usually as a result of very dramatic circumstances. Oft times it's too late for them to do anything about it, but each story has a sense of mercy, salvation, and redemption for those who turn themselves over to it. The idea that there is good in even the most evil is present in the stories, and very often those who appear to be good are evil and vice versa.

Overall, I LOVED each and every one of the stories. The remind me of what brilliant writing can and should be, particularly that for short stories. How each description can tell you so much more about what is really going on and where the story is headed. They had so much more to say without saying it out loud, but the concepts weren't so far out there that I would finish reading the story thinking, "Huh? WTF was that all about?"

So on I roll to The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. I hope this won't torture me too much, but we'll see. I guess anticipating to not enjoy it sets me up to be pleasantly surprised, right?

Only 249 books to go. Happy Monday.

"...Extreme Poverty, Almost Always a Cruel Stepmother, is Sometimes a Mother; Privation Gives Birth to Power of Soul and Mind"

I read LesMisérables about 4 to 5 years ago, and, like Moby Dick, it took the good portion of the year for me to complete it. My problem with long books like that is that they become a burden. And Les Misérables is not named Les Misérables for nothin'. It's 829 pages of misery and poverty in 19th century France. I guess for me, that, while overall a brilliant read, it just wasn't a riveting page-turner.

Which I guess is why I shouldn't have been surprised that I felt almost exactly the same way about Les Misérables, the movie. As a side note, I had never seen the stage musical, so from frame 1 of the movie, I was thrown off by the fact that EVERYTHING was sang, all the way through. I am a mad lover of movie musicals - don't get me started, or you may find yourself suffering through my renditions of "Moses Supposes" or "Sisters" - but most movie musicals usually only have songs interspersed between dialogue. Whereas this was all singing! All the time! Which just wasn't my favorite. And this was probably just my naïveté of having not seen the stage version, but sing-songy talking just takes away a bit from the action for me.

But my main problem with the movie was, like the book, it was so friggin' long! Yes, I get that they're spanning ~17 years worth of time across like 10 main characters, so there's a wholelotta story to jam pack in there. Plus, I'd imagine when Hollywood is spending big bucks for a sweeping epic movie like this, they're going to make it worth your (their?) while. But I kept thinking during the movie, if I was at home, I would be fast-forwarding through many of the songs; I think because they were singing the whole time, when it came to a main character's solo song, it just wasn't that monumental to me. Also because I knew the story line, I probably had a bit of a "C'mon let's get on with it!" attitude about it.

So overall, mehhhhh, it was just ok. It's worth seeing it for Hugh Jackman's and Anne Hathaway's performances (seriously, when she finished singing "I Dreamed a Dream" I think I actually said "Fuckin' A" out loud in the definitely-not-empty theatre), but maybe save it for leisurely at-home fast forwarding.

In other news, I have 2 more short stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find. Which I'm planning on banging out today. So if you're lucky, you'll get 2 posts in one day. TTFN.