Reading Diary | August

Still learning how to navigate reading at four months postpartum, I look up at my bookshelves. So many little worlds. My shelves are split into sections: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and short stories (roughly alphabetised, but please don’t look too closely). It's the short story collection I’m hovering in front of now. I have not made enough time for short stories in the last few years, and this is ridiculous because I love them. A good short story is a firework, igniting something, perhaps shocking you, then disappearing. A good short story is a Polaroid, a double exposure that hints at scenes happening just off the page — the lives that will keep living, even when you stop observing them. A good short story is real magic: able to tackle the fantastical in a way that not all long form content can, allowing you to suspend your disbelief for just a minute.

I have too many unread short story collections, so this week I decided to read a short story every day, each one from a different collection, to sample lots of different voices, and then choose which book (or books) I’d like to read in full.

Monday

The first collection I sample is Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. I read her debut novel Severance a few years ago, a cutting apocalyptic book (and no relation to the Apple TV series of the same name). Bliss Montage is an imported book from Australia, much larger than UK paperbacks and pleasingly floppy. The first story is simply called Los Angeles, which is a much less exciting title than one half-way through the book called Yeti Lovemaking but, no matter, because the story itself promises to be a good one. It opens with the kind of outrageous setting I love in a short story: “The house we live in has three wings. The west wing is where the Husband and I live. The east wing is where the children and their attending au pairs live. And lastly, the largest but ugliest wing, extending behind the house like a gnarled, broken arm, is where my 100 ex-boyfriends live.” Excellent, I think, and greedily read on.

This house and its impossible geography allow the narrator to live with everyone she’s ever dated. Unable to escape the past, she spends time with whichever boyfriend she’s in the mood to speak to, describing her family as furniture for when her memories become too real. “The husband is a resting place.” The narrator explains: “He is a chair. Sometimes I drape myself over him and I get the physical comfort of not being alone.” It’s a claustrophobic story, the house an allegory for a mind that can’t stop going over things, and it’s enough to live there for twenty-five pages — after which point you, along with many of the characters, want to flee and breathe in the air of somewhere new. This is a compliment.

Tuesday

I’ve never read a short story by John Wyndham, but I’ve very much enjoyed his novels. Today, I pick up his book Consider Her Ways and Others. The first story listed on the blurb is what drew me to it in the first place: “all the men have been killed by a virus and women continue to survive in a strict caste system — bottom of the heap are the mothers.” When I open the book, however, I discover that the first story is actually a novella at over seventy pages, which I don’t have time to read today, so I turn to a shorter story instead called Oh, Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? I enjoy it; it’s about a young Irish woman called Peggy who longs to go to Hollywood. By some coincidence she’s recruited to be on a TV show, and is then flown to London to meet a Hollywood producer. The story perhaps suffers a little from clumsy attempts at phonetically written speech (English, Irish and American), and sags a bit in the middle, but the sharp ending saves it. It’s a stinging look at how women are shaped for the screen, how individuality can be erased, personality squashed. It feels very Valley of the Dolls.

Wednesday

Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang is the book I pick up this morning. A young woman decides to house-sit, after being laid off from her job. She forms a new routine in this unfamiliar house owned by a rich couple, looking after their dog and admiring their artwork. I’m reminded of Ruman Alaam’s novel Leave the World Behind, as unease pulses behind the sentences. However, while the story starts to build some tension, it ends before the crescendo really has time to hit.

Thursday

I’ll admit I am slightly traumatised by the story I read today. It’s from Jan Carson’s new collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses. I first came across Jan’s work when she was shortlisted for the BBC short story award. The story surrounds family members coming together for a picnic, and all the unspoken things they swallow. She writes families and internal monologues so convincingly, it aches. If you’re a fan of Sarah Moss, you’ll like Jan Carson. The first story in her new book is a short one: a woman goes to a secluded beach every day to swim, and she is annoyed when a family also discovers the beach, interrupting her solitude. She sits, angrily pretending to read her book, watching as the family’s tiny baby inches towards the water’s edge, without its parents noticing. This story makes me so tense, I think I may pull a muscle.

Friday

Today I select Elsewhere by Yan Ge. This is her English-language debut, having previously written in Chinese — her novel Strange Beasts of China, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was one of my favourite books a couple of years ago. I’m not gripped by the first story in this collection, but the second story, Shooting an Elephant is fascinating. The protagonist, Shanshan, has moved to Ireland with her husband, Declan, and we’re told she is recovering from an event that they refuse to discuss. She’s a translator on pause, enduring microaggressions whenever she leaves the house. The story seems to embody the title of the collection, Elsewhere, as whenever Shanshan is talking about one thing, it’s ultimately a distraction from a troubled ‘elsewhere’ she is trying to avoid. This is perfectly illustrated by a scene in IKEA (a place Shanshan likes because she says it reminds her of China), where she fetches “an attractive woven basket from the display shelf” and is “disappointed when she sees that inside is a smaller one with ugly patterns, and the two baskets are stapled together by a plastic ring.” She cannot get to where she wants to be without also pulling the past along with her. The layers of this story are satisfyingly complex and I am left wanting more.

Saturday

The premise of Caturday in Attention Seekers by Emma Brankin is an amusing one. A young woman is outraged that her cat, an animal her ex-girlfriend seemed to love more than her, is now more popular online than she is. “In a misguided attempt to remind people that she exists, [Ash] uploads a photograph to her own account of her dinner and promptly loses nine followers. Meanwhile, the cat receives an invitation to a VIP pamper spa sponsored by a pet food company.” The writing is reminiscent of Eliza Clark and Saba Sams, as Ash tries to think of increasingly ridiculous ways to claw her way back into her ex-girlfriend’s life. It makes me giggle.

Sunday

I appear to have accidentally saved the best for last. Come Let Us Sing Anyway by Leone Ross opens with the line: “Mrs Neecy Brown’s husband is falling in love.” Unfortunately, he’s not falling in love with her. For years, Mrs Neecy Brown has pretended not to notice that her husband is having affairs, but this time he’s gone too far: he has come home smelling of a new woman, and this laziness is the type of disrespect she just cannot ignore. Taking to the tube, she stares from person to person. Is that the woman? What about that one? Exhausted, she falls asleep, waking up at Heathrow to find she’s sitting opposite someone whose “voice is slow and wet, like a leaf in autumn. A crushed, gleaming leaf, in shades of gold and red and yellow.” This story, Love Silk Food, is about connection and nourishment. As with the best tales, reading it is like watching good bread being made: expertly knocked into shape so that it doubles in size, magically taking up space. Ross’s story has the same warmth as another favourite book of mine, Mr Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo.

I sit back. This has been a fun experiment. Looking at the seven books in front of me, I think I’ll shelve four to come back to another time. For now, I’ll continue with my three favourites: Come Let Us Sing Anyway by Leone Ross, Elsewhere by Yan Ge and Quickly, While They Still Have Horses by Jan Carson. A great mixture of strangeness, warmth, and tension.

Jen Campbell is a bestselling author and award-winning poet. Her own short story collection The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is published by Hachette.