As is typical of scores of years now I have a significant reading regimen as part of ministry, professional development, and teaching, but mostly out of passion for the discipline of reading. Here are some of the volumes I am still in as of Janauary 2025:

1. Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)
2. The Collected Short Stories of Shirley Jackson (Shirley Jackson)
3. Dubliners (Joyce)
4. The Greatest Short Stories of Anton Chekhov (Chekhov)
5. A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1969-1994 (Alice Munro)
6. The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe (Wolfe)
7. Great Short Stories of the Masters (Ed., Charles Neider)

The styles of the authors really could not be more different. Though all are short story masters, Anderson wrote with a laconic understated style, whereas Joyce was showy. Munro and Jackson are masters of character and psychology, while Wolfe was a wordsmith in love with the rhapsodies of the English language and the passions of being a young man. Chekhov is in a league all his own, he was so insightful. But taken together, it’s just a delight to traffic in the works of these masters of the short story form.

Grateful to be able to teach courses on the short story genre I so enjoy. Hopefully the courses will be used to encourage deeper and better reading by students and others, and to inculcate better writing–a craft that has suffered for decades due to the dumbing down of education.

Tolle lege.