Short Story Wednesday: "The Portobello Road" by Muriel Spark

 

Last week,  at her Short Story Wednesday post, Patricia Abbott featured a short story collection by Muriel Spark, The Stories of Muriel Spark. Later my husband found this ghost story by Muriel Spark in one of his ghost story anthologies, The Literary Ghost: Great Contemporary Ghost Stories, edited by Larry Dark. Last night I read the first three stories in The Literary Ghost, including "The Portobello Road" by Muriel Spark.

Of the three stories, "The Portobello Road" was easily  my favorite. In this story, the ghost is the narrator. For some reason, not described in detail, this ghost had more business to finish and had not left the earth. She often strolled down Portobello Road, checking out the marketers and their stalls on the pavement. On one of her strolls she sees two people she knows, Kathleen and George. She speaks to the man and he can see her, although the woman cannot. From this point the ghost tells the story of herself (nicknamed "Needle"), and three of her childhood friends, Kathleen, George and a boy named "Skinny." They are very close friends while in school, but after they graduate, they go off to other areas, even other continents. George goes to manage his uncle's farm in Africa, and Skinny and Needle end up visiting him there. Kathleen stays in London with her rich connections. George eventually ends up returning to Great Britain because he wants to marry Kathleen, which leads to Needle's eventual death. This is my kind of ghost story.

Per EBSCO Knowledge Advantage this story was first published in 1958.

The first story in the book, "The Lost, Strayed, Stolen," by M.F.K. Fisher did not appeal to me at all. I think that the ghost story may be a fine one, and it is spooky, but for my tastes there was not enough background to flesh it out.

The third story was "The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees" by Robertson Davies. I thought it was pretty good. It was about a professor at a college who ends up trapped in a room with a ghost who wants to defend his Ph.D. thesis because he never got the chance to do that while alive. It was shorter than the others and on the humorous side. A light read but not silly.

I will be revisiting this anthology more this month, and in another post I will list all the stories and authors in the book. 

#HYH25: Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

I read this book for Neeru's Hundred Years Hence challenge. The goal is to read one or more books that were published for the first time in 1925.  The challenge runs until the end of 2025.

Reading Mrs. Dalloway was a good experience for me. It was the first book I had read by Virginia Woolf, plus I had never read anything written in stream of consciousness style. It did take me a good while to adjust to that style of telling a story, and it got even more confusing when the story moves from Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts to various other people's ruminations.

The story is basically a day in the life of Charissa Dalloway. As she goes through her day she muses about her past and her future: her daughter; her daughter's friend, who she doesn't like; and her own relationships with men over the years. She is probably thinking about the men in her life because an old boyfriend will be visiting her soon. He has been out of the country (in India) and they haven't seen each other for a long time. 

The old boyfriend is Peter Walsh, and he still has feelings for Clarissa. Peter Walsh musings as he visits London and Clarissa are second focus of the book. There is another couple whose thoughts are shared in the book, although they have no real connection to Mrs. Dalloway other than proximity to her when she goes out on her morning walk, to pick up flowers for the party she will be giving in the evening. That couple, Septimus and Lucrezia Smith, have an interesting story and it is kind of a downer.

The edition I read had a Foreward by Jenny Offill and an Introduction by Elaine Showalter.

My Thoughts:

This book is just filled with lovely quotes, sad quotes, quotes to think about. But I had a difficult time reading it. So many characters are touched on that I got lost at times. Since it is told in stream of consciousness style, this makes perfect sense, but it still did not make for a pleasant read. There were many pages and sections that I had to reread to make any sense of. 

The story has a lot of depth to it. It is about a middle-aged woman, doubting herself as she gets older and her daughter nears adulthood. It takes place on one day in June in 1923, so the reader sees a picture of life 100 plus years ago, in London, written by someone living at that time. The story of Septimus and Lucrezia Smith involves the husband's mental illness due to his experiences in the Great War. 

One thing I noted while reading this novel and even more so afterward is how much difference it might make whether you read this novel for the first time when you are a teen, or thirty, or fifty, or like me, in your seventies. Jenny Offill expanded on this idea in her Foreword (although I recommend not reading the Foreword until after you have read the book for the first time).

Since I am not familiar with Virginia Woolf's novels and stories, I did not realize that the character of Mrs. Dalloway shows up in other writings by her. She appears in Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, and in at least one short story, "Mrs. Dalloway of Bond Street." That makes me want to read more by Virginia Woolf (recommendations are welcome). 

I do hope to reread this book sometime to see what more I can get out of it on a second reading, when I am not distracted by the unusual structure.

Annual Book Sale 2025: My Son's Books

As usual, we attended the Planned Parenthood Book Sale that runs for 10 days in September; the first few days and the last few days are the busiest; we went five times this year. 

My son's tastes usually are in the fantasy or science fiction genres. Below are a few of the books that my son purchased this year.

Can't Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

Originally published in 2022; this trade paperback edition was published in 2024.

This is a cozy fantasy about a lesbian couple who want to leave their current lives behind and open a bookstore in a remote location where no one can find them. The problem is that one of them is a private guard to a powerful and cruel queen, and the other is an important and powerful mage. 

Note: I just finished reading this book and I enjoyed it a lot. It seemed to me to go just a bit beyond the bounds of cozy, but that was fine with me.

Dinotopia Lost by Alan Dean Foster

Dinotopia is a fictional utopia created originally by James Gurney in 1992. In the first book, Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, which had illustrations, Arthur Denison and his son, Will, are shipwrecked on island where humans and dinosaurs live together in harmony. James Gurney wrote three more books about Dinotopia, but other authors have also written spin-off books in the series. In Alan Dean Foster's Dinotopia Lost, published in 1996, a ship with a crew of pirates lands on the island.

Monday Starts on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Andrew Bromfield (Translation)

This book was first published in 1965 and seems to be a combination of science fiction and fantasy. Humorous and satirical.

This description is from a summary at Goodreads: 

Sasha, a young computer programmer from Leningrad, is driving north to meet some friends for a nature vacation. He picks up a couple of hitchhikers, who persuade him to take a job at the National Institute for the Technology of Witchcraft and Thaumaturgy. The adventures Sasha has in the largely dysfunctional Institute involve all sorts of magical beings—a wish-granting fish, a tree mermaid, a cat who can remember only the beginnings of stories, a dream-interpreting sofa, a motorcycle that can zoom into the imagined future, a lazy dog-size mosquito—along with a variety of wizards (including Merlin), vampires, and officers. 

The Protectorate Series by Megan E. O'Keefe

This series is a space opera trilogy, that begins with Velocity Weapon (published in 2019, 544 pages) and continues the story with Chaos Vector (published in 2020, 546 pages) and Catalyst Gate (published in 2021, 608 pages). The 1st book sounds very good, and I have read good reviews of the 2nd and 3rd books. 

This excerpt from the review at Kirkus is the best description of the first book in the series that I could find.

The last thing Sanda Greeve remembers is her ship being attacked by rebel forces. She's resuscitated from her evacuation pod missing half a leg—and two centuries—as explained to her by the AI of the rebel ship that rescued her. As The Light of Berossus—aka Bero—tells her, she may be the only living human for light-years around, as the war wiped both sides out long ago. Sanda struggles to process her injuries and her grief but finds friendship with the lonely spaceship itself. Sanda's story is interspersed with flashbacks to the war's effects on her brother, Biran, as well as scenes from a heist gone terribly wrong for small-time criminal Jules. The three narratives, separated by a vast gulf of time, are more intertwined than is immediately apparent. When Sanda rescues Tomas, another unlikely survivor, from his own evacuation pod, she learns that even time doesn't end all wars. Should she trust Tomas, a fellow human but a rebel soldier who has his own secrets—or Bero, the ship that saved her?

                            Velocity Weapon

                  

                              Chaos Vector

                                Catalyst Gate

Pesticide: Kim Hays

This summary is from Kim Hays' website:

In Pesticide, a street party in Bern morphs into a brutal riot. Hours later, with the medieval downtown a shambles, a young man is found beaten to death with a policeman’s club. That same day, twenty miles away, an organic farmer turns up on his land, dead and drenched in pesticide. Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder and her younger colleague Renzo Donatelli start out on two separate cases, but it doesn’t take long before they find links between their victims. Working together on what has become a single, puzzling case, the two can no longer ignore their attraction to each other.

 

Pesticide is the first book in the Linder and Donatelli series. When reading mysteries, I have a preference for police procedurals because they are more believable. Detective Giuliana Linder is an experienced homicide detective; she has worked with Investigator Renzo Donatelli before but this time they start out on different cases in very different locations. It is assumed that the death of the young man in Bern is drug-related, but soon officials realize that the elderly man who owns and works on an organic farm outside of Bern had business dealings with the younger victim and decide to combine the cases.

My thoughts

I like to read police procedurals set in countries other than the US, because I like to learn about how the various legal and law enforcement departments work in each country. The author of this book does a great job of showing all the different types of people working on the case, and in this novel, we get to see two groups of investigators coming together to solve two related cases. Although a lot of the focus was on the procedure of solving a crime, the pacing was good and the story never dragged.

Getting a peak at organic farming in this story is fascinating. I learned a lot about the mechanics of farming and the rules of organic farming. The story divides its time between the police in Bern and the community in the outlying rural area, where one of the crimes occurred.

I liked the characters in this story, both the main characters and secondary characters. The ending was very good; the  mystery was tied up well and realistically. I will definitely be reading the next book in the series.

For more details on the plot, please see Kevin Tipple's excellent review at Kevin's Corner.

Kim Hays has dual Swiss/American citizenship, and has lived in Bern with her husband for 37 years. She has a very nice website with information about Bern and Switzerland, in addition to descriptions of her books.

Short Story Wednesday: Get in Trouble by Kelly Link

 

This post was written for Short Story Wednesday hosted at Patti Abbott's blog, and Short Story September, hosted by Lisa at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog.

I knew very little about Kelly Link or her writing before I read this book, but this is what I gleaned from my recent reading about this book and her short stories.

This short story collection, Get in Trouble, was published in 2015 and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Per Wikipedia, this collection "contains nine short stories, five of which were previously published. The stories contain elements of fantasy, magical realism, and light horror." Usually I avoid horror, but light horror seemed doable. So I read the first story in the book, "The Summer People," and reviewed it in August of this year.

I liked that story a lot, so I decided to finish reading the stories in this book in September. In general, the stories are pretty long. I think the shortest one was 20 pages, the longest close to 50 pages. 

Here are my thoughts on the remaining stories.

"I Can See Right Through You"

This is the story of two celebrities who have had an off and on relationship for years, ever since they made their only movie together when they were very young, and they both became stars overnight. The story hints at some supernatural elements but mostly it is a straightforward story about Meggie and the "demon lover." He is referred to only by that name throughout the story. The story starts in the 1990s and brings the couple up to around 2012, when Meggie is hosting a ghost-hunting show. A very strange story and I enjoyed it. I would have liked a more concrete ending, but still it was very effective.

"Secret Identity"

A 15-year old girl goes to New York to meet an older man (34 years old) at a hotel. She met him online and represented herself as about his age. At the same time as she arrives at the hotel there are two conventions there, one for superheroes and sidekicks and one for dentists. I liked this story a lot. It is told from the young girl's point of view, in a letter she is writing to Paul Zell, the older man. She is way more mature than I was at 15, and a very interesting character.

"Valley of the Girls"

The characters in this story are teenagers who are very rich and can do just about anything they like. It is set in a universe where pyramids are built for teenagers and they can have alternate identities so that they experiment and play around without ruining their futures. A very creepy story, and fortunately one of the shorter stories.

I thought this was a very clever story but it was hard for me to follow. So I read it a second time. On that read I saw clues that pointed to the end of the story from the very beginning. So other readers may find this a more satisfying read than I did. I am not sure I like it when I need to read a story twice to get it.

"Origin Story"

This story is set in a world where superheroes and sidekicks are taken for granted. More than one reviewer noticed that it could be set in the same world as "Secret Identity," but with different characters and locations. The story is kind of sad but still a decent story.

"The Lesson"

This was my favorite story. It was the only one with no element of the supernatural or weird. It did surprise me and I kept waiting for the supernatural element to show up. 

A gay couple are expecting a baby, who will be delivered by a surrogate mother. The couple plan to go off to a wedding at a remote spot and worry about the baby being born early.  

"The New Boyfriend"

This is another story about a set of rich teenagers. The most popular girl in the group, Ainslie, has three "boyfriends" but they are toys, sort of like robots. They can be set to different modes and programmed in some ways. Ainslie's best friend Immy is jealous, and finds a way to spend some time with one of the boyfriends. This was not my favorite story; reading about rich, selfish teens is not especially interesting to me. However, there was a great conversation between Immy and her father about the nature of love, so I rate it highly anyway.

"Two Houses"

This is a blending of a ghost story and science fiction. The characters are astronauts on a long spaceflight to a faraway star. They sometimes sleep for years but now and then they are awakened for celebrations and this  time it is a birthday party, where they tell each other ghost stories. Another weird story where I would have appreciated a more concrete ending.

"Light"

This longer story is set in the Florida Keys after some strange events have caused significant "changes" in the world and opened up pocket universes where possibilities are endless. People can be born with no shadow or with two shadows. Those with two shadows may have a twin. Lindsey is one of the people with two shadows and she and her twin have a troubled relationship. She has a job where she oversees a warehouse of sleeping bodies which have appeared since the "changes" took place. 

There were several things I liked about this story. When my son was in preschool, we used to bring hibiscus flowers to the school to feed the iguana. In this story, iguanas were all over the place and were eating up all the hibiscus bushes. In addition to that small piece of nostalgia, I like that the story centered more on adults. The character development in this story was very good, especially that of the main character.  

I don't usually write so much all about the stories in a short story book, and I think that I did for this one is a reflection on how much I was impressed with Kelly Link's writing. Even when the stories had elements that I did not like, I still felt like they were good reads, well worth my time.

Short Story Wednesday: Collections from the Book Sale

 

Last Friday, September 12, was the first day of the Planned Parenthood Book Sale; it will continue through Sunday, September 21. We went to the book sale on both Friday and Saturday. (And we will go back again tomorrow, and Saturday and Sunday.) 

Every year I plan to limit my short story book purchases at the sale, since I have so many already, both in print editions and on the Kindle. Yet I was unable to resist the four books I am featuring here.

The Complete Stories, Volume 1

Isaac Asimov

This book consists of the stories previously collected in Earth Is Room Enough (1957), Nine Tomorrows (1959), and Nightfall and Other Stories (1969). There are a total of 48 stories by Asimov in this volume. Asimov wrote short stories in other genres, but my impression is that this volume is primarily science fiction and fantasy tales. 

I, Robot

Isaac Asimov

This is a book I have planned to read for years. It consists of nine short stories, which originally appeared in science-fiction magazines in the 1940's. Recently, Kelly at Kelly's Thoughts & Ramblings read and reviewed I, Robot. She enjoyed the book and that motivated me to read it sooner rather than later.

The Truth and Other Stories

Stanisław Lem; Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Translator); Kim Stanley Robinson (Foreword)

Stanisław Lem (1921-2006) was a Polish writer. I don't know much about his writing, except that he was best know for his science fiction novels and short stories. His most well-known novel was Solaris (1961). This book of 12 science fiction short stories was published in 2021 and includes 9 stories that previously had not been published in English.

Lake of Souls: the Collected Short Fiction

Ann Leckie

I took a chance on this book because I am interested in Ancillary Justice, the first book in her Imperial Radch series. This collection has seven stories from the Universe of The Raven Tower, a standalone novel, three stories from the Imperial Radch Universe, and eight unrelated stories.