"Nobody Can Say, 'Forgive The Heavy Heart That Loves More Than The Tongue Can Say Or The Hands Can Do. Look Back At Me Every Time I Look At You And Never Feel Pity, For What My Heart Holds This Minute Is Better Than What You Offer The Least Bit Less.'"

Lesson learned: 600 page books of short stories might be the death of me. 1) Because it's 600 pages, and 2) because by the time I get halfway through the book, I can hardly remember the 20+ short stories that I already read. So I found myself going back through the stories and quizzing myself regarding what they were about. So maybe in the future, I'll have to read a book of short stories in conjunction with an full novel so I can break up the short stories and actually have a chance of remembering them a little better.

With that being said, I actually liked The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty very much. She is without a doubt a master of the form of the short story. The richness with which she describes her settings is like nothing I've ever read before. It's not as though she just pulls in a bunch of fancy adjectives or a few clever similes to describe something . It's a completely different approach to describing landscape, and nature, and interiors using concepts and structure that I've never seen before. And while I guess Eudora Welty is considered a Southern Gothic writer (although apparently she disagreed with that sentiment), and there definitely was a bit of a sinister edge to most of the stories, the stories definitely didn't seem as full-blown dark as Flannery O'Conner, whose stories I also recently read.

She also uses a technique that I like to call "writing around the event," where she tells of a critical moment in the story, but she doesn't just blurt it out and lay it out in such obvious terms. She presents it in vague descriptions, and then almost skips to the next part of the narrative without really telling you what happened. This is particularly true for intense moments (murder/death, sex) that are the pivotal moments in the stories (examples: "Sir Rabbit", "The Whole World Knows", "No Place for You, My Love", and "The Burning"). So much so that I often found myself having to stop mid-story and Google it to find out if what I thought happened (or what I could discern from how it was written) did indeed happen. And I really liked the idea of this. I liked the idea of not handing your reader the narrative on a silver platter, but to make them really re-read the words and conclude for themselves what was really going on in the context of the rest of the story (ok fine, so I cheated and concluded for myself after googling. So sue me). I would like to say that I will in the future try to incorporate approaches like this into my own writing, but I wouldn't even be presumptuous to assume that I could even remotely pull it off. My approach would probably end up seeming as though I wrote the story straight up and then just deleted a couple of critically important pages and just assumed that the reader could figure it out. Not a sound approach. 

So one more book in the books. I'm taking a quick sojourn from my lists to read Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. I've found lately that I really miss reading modern literature. My mom and sister are both in book clubs and when I was on vacation with them recently, I had a twinge of jealousy when they were talking about all the modern fiction they were reading and how much they enjoyed this book or that book. When I'm stuck in either 1940's Mississippi or 1600's England with Shakespeare. I'm looking forward to reading a book in less than 6 months because I'm slogging through the content.

Onward! 238 more books to go. Ugh, I feel like I've been at 238 forever.