Summer reading

Summer already over and we are officially into Fall* but a good book is worth reading any time. So here's a collection of short stories, recommended in an NPR piece on summer reading.

My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekov to Munro, edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

If you only read one (gasp!) book this summer, make it this one. Like a great mix tape, My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead is inspired and personal, a conceptually coherent gathering of seemingly disparate pieces that relies on Jeffrey Eugenides' artful curatorship to make it resonate as a whole.

By placing James Joyce next to Denis Johnson, Chekov next to Grace Paley, Nabokov next to Lorrie Moore and Stuart Dybek next to Miranda July, Jeffrey Eugenides makes familiar voices fresh and new and invites us to read authors we might not have picked up otherwise. He edits like a fan, not a scholar, and isn't afraid to pick favorites, which is exactly what makes this a book you'll want to keep forever and give to all your friends. Keep in mind, though, if it's romantic comedy you're looking for, you'll want to skip this collection and hit the movie theater instead. But if you're in the market for jaw-dropping, miss-your-train-stop, weep-in-front-of-strangers writing, you can do no better than this truly stellar collection.

Actually, there is another fine collection of short stories that I need to get hold of (or maybe buy) - The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford. Its the "new" book because apparently, Ford had edited similar collection in 1992 of short and long stories. This "new" one has 44 stories, with an overwhelming majority of them written in the past 15 years.

* Aah...trust Wikipedia to teach me something (I *HAD to* look it up, didn't I!):

In the northern hemisphere, the meteorological start of autumn (fall) is on 1 September. The astronomical start of autumn is on the Autumnal Equinox (22–23 September) and ends on the Winter Solstice (21–22 December) in the northern hemisphere. Autumn starts on or around 7 August and ends on about 6 November in solar term.

So, summer may or may not yet be over depending on whether you take a meteorological or astronomical or solar look at it! :)