Short Story Collections – How Do You Eat Yours?

I like a good short story just as much as any novel but I find I haven’t got the stamina to read a whole book of them all at once.

You might be thinking, ‘that makes no sense’, but it does. Honest.

When you approach a novel you are committing yourself to one big story with characters you will get to know and follow throughout all 300 or so pages. A short story collection may be the same amount of pages but, more often than not, they’re unrelated stories and characters. Sometimes they’re all on a theme or share a location or single character but not always and even when they do, I have the same problem.

If I try to read a collection all the way through I get frustrated because my head tries to link them all into one story even though I know they aren’t. This is why it takes me three times longer to read a book of short stories than it does to read an epic fantasy tome – I have to read it in bits, one or two stories at a time, in between reading other things.

I write them in a similar manner. Never more than two in a row and they usually pop up in the middle of other, longer pieces.

There are some short story collections in my Summer Break Challenge line-up and I’m telling you now they will be the ones that take me longest to get through. This doesn’t mean I dislike reading them, I’m just very particular about how I go about it. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know. Can you read whole collections at once?