Short stories way to keep up with lit on the go

All Things Literary

Deep in the dark catacombs of my private reading library, past the rings of protective blue flame and the three-headed guard dogs, is a shelf of books devoted solely to short-story collections.

Thick as bricks or thin as leaves, these books stand out from the rest for one distinct aspect — stuck inside each one, in varying degrees of progress, are bookmarks. Naked Post-It notes, discarded scraps of paper, Christmas gift bookmarks, the occasional (if somewhat heretical) dog-eared page — what is important is that these books, unlike their surrounding kith and kin, remain unfinished.

Now, normally this would be impermissible for the obsessive-compulsive reader I am, devoted wholeheartedly to the idea of completing a book before moving on to the next one. It is a topic I've touched on before, yet I think it important to note for fellow reading purists, like myself, the benefits of short-story collections.

Consider such collections loopholes, if you will — akin to the kind found all-too-frequently in politics or hidden in the fine print on contracts and tax forms. Most short stories can be read in one sitting, especially when reading for pleasure and not for any analytical or research purposes. Give an hour before bed to Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Ernest Hemingway or Vladimir Nabokov, and one easily could tackle two or three.

With writers such as Raymond Carver, one almost could knock out a whole collection (though you undoubtedly would gloss over much of the dense subtext).

But, because most short stories are by name and nature so quick to read, there are no problems with putting a collection down and coming back to it days/months/years from now. There are no tremors, sweaty palms, constant worries or any other traditional ailments that come with reading a longer novel in time-permitting sections.

Will I forget what's going on? Will any of it make sense? Will I have to start all over again? Forget it. With these collections, no such separation anxiety exists.

Any John Updike aficionados are probably well aware of the recent collection of his early stories from 1953 to 1975. That book rests somewhere along my shelves, untouched by the bookmark that eventually will pierce the hide of 800 white pages between the spines. Normally, the expansive collection would take a while to read. Divided out in digestible portions, it no doubt will take even longer.

And when the time comes for the collection to be placed to the side in the wake of some unforeseen, spontaneous change in reading material, it will have a home on the shelf among its bookmarked brothers and sisters. Will it, and all the other collections currently gathering an extra skin of fluff and dust on the shelf, ever be finished? It's impossible to say; I shudder to contemplate how many books on my shelves need to be read, let alone how many short-story collections.

Regardless, there the collections will sit, all of them waiting to be finished, story by short story