the long and the short of it

I just spent an hour in my local library. I usually read novels but I went in to find a short story to read. Any short story. I want to study short story writing, good and bad. Finding time, making time, to sit in a library and read is a surprisingly hard thing to do for some reason. I could of course take books out to read at home but this exercise is about sitting in my local library and reading whichever story I pick out from the rather small selection of volumes that my local library stocks. Perhaps short stories aren't very popular amongst borrowers so the library doesn't stock many titles or, conversely, maybe they are incredibly popular and all out on loan.

It's an enjoyable project. I have read a Dickensian whodunnit (Edward Marston), a pulp fiction mystery (Micky Spillane), a sci-fi classic (Ray Bradbury) and a couple of dreadful horror stories - as in horror stories that were dreadfully bad and so I will leave the authors anonymous. There have also been stories by Alice Munro, Patrick Gale, and Margaret Atwood, all considered at the top of the tree. One should at least attempt to learn from the best.

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