This book is yet another example of why I love anthologies. It has so much brilliant writing, some of it is from authors I’d already read before, other stories from authors I’ve only just encountered in this volume.
I approached it with trepidation solely due to the size of the book. 631 pages makes for a hefty tome. It’s challenging for the hands, I have small hands with little strength in the muscles, and hard to read in bed. It would be much easier to read on a ereader where you can also bump up the font size.
The other thing I found challenging is one or two of the stories. There are 32 stories in this and with the amount of stories published throughout the world I would have expected each and every one of them to be top notch and spell binding. One or two of them were not. I don’t think I’ve marked which ones but they really slowed me down as I forgot what I’d read, forgot what the story was about and had to reread various parts. But I got through them, heaved a sigh of relief and wandered into the next story.
The other challenge I’ve found is getting older. When I was younger I could read story after story without taking time out for a break. Now I find I need time to stop and let the story settle in my brain before continuing. This was the case with almost every single story in here. There were so many thought-provoking ideas and writing that made me stop to actually think that a short break between each one became mandatory.
Here’s an example by Dominic Green. Called the “Butterfly Bomb” part of the story focuses on Gods. Old Krishna is on a journey and he’s taken his God with him. His God is a rock, and he’s taken this fragment so he can take his God on long journeys.
“But who decided your god was a rock?”
“I did.”
It just made me think about religion in general and how we decide what our God looks like. The rest of the story also made me stop and think.
What you get in this anthology above most of the other anthologies on my shelf is diversity. Looking at the list of authors gives you an idea of the diversity, there are so many different cultures represented here. And that gives a wide and diverse list of short stories. Some of them I celebrated as I’d never read a short story written by a person of that culture, others I got totally lost by as they were too far from my knowledge and experience.