I like a Gershwin tune; how about you?

[mrissa]

So it turns out there’s a lot of stuff I like. I like our new dishwasher and how it sings a happy song when it’s done-oh, I am unreasonably gleeful about that dishwasher. I like the fact that strawberries are in season. But that’s not why I’m doing these round-up posts-I’m doing an every-so-often post of short stories I’ve read and liked, that

Comments

[teadog1425]

This isn't intended as a request, unless it is something that you would want to do, but the thing that stops me from clicking through and reading the short stories you link is that I have had bad experiences before getting ambushed by images or events in short stories that I have found really upsetting, and it has been difficult to remove them from my mind afterwards. The difficulty getting rid of them is not unique to short stories, but the getting-ambushed is - somehow it is easier to have a heads up in a longer form or via visual media... It would be very reassuring to have some kind of description as to what the story is about and what mode/tone it is in, but I appreciate that is more work, so I'm deliberately not _asking_ for this, just explaining an anecdata point as to my wariness about short-story reading!:-)

[mrissa]

I will think about what I can do for descriptions--possibly they will take more energy than I have at a given point, or possibly I will be able to. While I support people needing this sort of description, I personally am terrible at noticing and figuring out what will bother other people. I try to a certain extent when I'm making my book notes, but I've noticed when asked to give book recommendations for particular restricted populations that I'm just really bad at focusing my reading on that.

[teadog1425]

I totally hear you on the available time/energy! And even just a very general mood/genre headsup would be a help - it's a quirky, fun, sci-fi fable or a grim-dark bad-science tragedy or something! I know what you mean though, I've read reviews (not yours!) of books I know where I've been looking sideways at the reviewer thinking: that was totally not the book I read, innnteresting! Brains are weird!

[vcmw]

The Monkey King, Faerie Queen story was so much fun, and Kaleidotrope hasn't been on my reading list so I would have missed it - thank you for the link / recommendation! (I read it when you linked it on twitter but didn't think to say anything then I think so this is me saying so now. Thanks!)

[mrissa]

Hurray!

[fidelioscabinet]

I loved Monkey King Faerie Queen so very much. The Monkey King rocks.