I find short story collections difficult to read. Perhaps because I read quickly, I come to the end of a story and feel unsatisfied. With novels, especially long ones, we’re given a cast of characters that we get to know over the course of time, but with short stories, I feel like I barely know them by the time the story ends. A good collection of stories for me then must make me feel satiated by the end of each story. Luckily, I’ve read two such collections over the past month.

First is Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead. He’s a writer who doesn’t stick to one genre. He infuses some of the stories with science fiction and fantasy usually to delve into larger issues. The title story, set sometime in twenty third century Pennsylvannia, turns out to be the college application essay of the narrator. It also explains why they shouldn’t expect him anytime soon as he tells how he met Jane, who lives in the Lake of the Dead. DeNiro’s stories with elements of the bizarre and the fantastic are original and clever without being overdone.

The second collection I enjoyed was Scott Snyder’s (you may have read this nice review by Andrew Sean Greer in the NYT). Snyder’s imaginative stories deal with people displaced by something in life. Some of them seem sepia toned, set back in the early twentieth century. The last story “The Star Attraction of 1919” beautifully tells the story of a barnstormer who accidentally crashes a wedding. When the bride insists on running away with him, he finds her a marvelous companion. It was my favorite story in the collection. Dark, yet whimsical, the stories and characters capture your imagination.

I’ve become a big reader of literary journals over the past year or so. On top of all the magazines, it can be difficult to find the time to keep with all of them, but the quality has been so good lately. Here are a few that I’ve been reading.

The new Virginia Review Quarterly devoted almost their entire Spring 2006 issue to Darwin and Evolution. I’ve just read David Quammen’s essay “Mr. Darwin’s Abominable Volume”—completely fascinating. He writes about the actual writing of Origin of the Species. How Alfred Russell Wallace was on the same track as Darwin and that finally spurred Darwin on to write his book. Their Summer issue, which I haven’t received yet, contains a short story by Alice Munro from her forthcoming collection as well as a slew of authors writing about appreciating Munro.

The newest Granta called On the Road Again explores travel writing and whether it can be more than just literary entertainment. It contains imaginative essays by John Burnside, Tim Parks, Tia Wallman to name a few.

It’s hard to live in Boston and not have heard of Michael Patrick MacDonald. He wrote All Soul’s: A Family Story from Southie back in 1999, which told his story of growing up in Old Colony housing project. He lost four brothers to drugs, poverty and violence and watched firsthand the riots around the busing crisis. His second memoir Easter Rising: An Irish American Coming Up from Under , coming at the end of September, tells of how he got out of Southie. More than that, however, it’s a wonderful portrait of Boston in the 1980s as he ventures outside the walls of Old Colony into the punk scene. He writes about hearing the Sex Pistols for the first time, seeing Mission of Burma, shows at the Rat. His reputation as the quiet one in his large Irish family extend into his social life. While his friends get into drugs and alcohol, he stays sober somehow.

Family tragedies keep sucking him back to what he considers at the time a prison. MacDonald even writes about meeting his father for the first time at his wake. There are some moments of levity in the book, especially the scene where his grandfather accuses him of “worshipping the devil with the punk rocks” and gives him holy water. It’s also his grandfather who convinces him to visit Ireland while he’s in Europe bumming around and it’s there that MacDonald comes to terms with his Irish roots for the first time. It’s an energizing read and MacDonald avoids the cheesy sentiment that you might expect.

Another book I enjoyed recently was Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident. I liked her story collection Lucky Girls from 2003 and wondered how her writing would translate to a novel. In this new book, the chapters go back and forth between Yuan Zhao, a Chinese performance artist and political dissident, to the Travers, a wealthy family in Los Angeles who host the artist during his residency in America. Zhao’s chapters reminisce on his unrequited love in Beijing back in earlier days during a time of artistic revolution and his growing obsession with a student in Los Angeles. The Traver’s chapters deal with the disintegration of the family as the various family members stumble along. I found Zhao’s story more interesting, perhaps because so many books these days document the dysfunctional family falling apart at the seams. But I think Freudenberger’s book also deals with larger themes. She spends a lot of time on artists and the concept of art. Her attention to detail and ability to probe the sometimes uncomfortable depths of the characters make this book a great first novel.

Head over to Ed’s to read part one of our roundtable in which we discuss the new T.C. Boyle novel Talk Talk. This was my first foray into Boyle’s work and I enjoyed it.

I just finished Franzen’s memoir, due out in September, and I must say that I was disappointed. This is not a traditional memoir, rather it’s collected essays, several of which have been in the New Yorker previously. Remember the article he wrote on Charles Schulz several years ago when Fantagraphics began reprinting all of the Peanuts? That’s in there as is the article on birding. Already I’ve read two of the six chapters in a slim, 197 page book.

Don’t get me wrong. I personally think Franzen is a great writer and that’s why I am disappointed—I wanted more. I loved the first essay ‘House for Sale’, which moves back and forth from today to his teenage years, where Franzen’s remembrance of his years in the Christian Fellowship made me squirm. The same with the following two essays. After that, the book loses steam, the essays lose their impact. I don’t know if Franzen just threw all of these together or what, but the lack of focus gives you an incomplete look at the author. Perhaps that’s what he wants, after the Oprah fiasco. I just hope his next book is stronger.

Martin Booth certainly was a lucky boy. He and his parents moved to Hong Kong during the Korean War and Martin’s mother, rather than holding him back like the other boys, let him roam freely around the area. We’re lucky because of his ability to recall that time in his lovely book Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. Living at the Fourseas Hotel in Kowloon, Marin explores his vast neighborhood. His distant and cruel father, away for work most of the time, usually spends his time at home sleeping or drinking. His fun and adventurous mother however turns a blind eye towards Martin’s wanderings and even takes part in some of it. His biggest asset might be his hunger to know and see everything. He has no fear about talking to people he doesn’t understand or who can’t understand him. In fact, he realizes quickly that he must learn Chinese if he wants to explore. What I loved best were the descriptions of what he saw—you could smell the streets, taste the food, and hear the sounds of the people going about their daily lives.

Sticking to the Biography genre, I turned to Da Chen’s Colors of the Mountain, his story of growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China. His memoir helped me see the Revolution in a new light. I’ve certainly read about its broad political and sociological ramifications but Chen’s memoir brought it all down to a much more personal level. Growing up as a member of the landlord class (though now certainly very poor), his family is subject to all sorts of torments and allowed to do nothing to defend themselves. His descriptions of school will make your blood boil. Made to suffer for being smart, he endures humiliation from the teachers on a regular basis. It’s not until he befriends a gang of tough kids that he feels like he fits in anywhere. I found the book engaging and its strength lies in its simplicity. Its weakness lies in Chen’s occasional self back patting. The memoir ends as Chen leaves his village to attend college in Beijing and I was not surprised to learn that there is a second memoir that picks up right where he left off. Also the Chen has a novel called Brothers appearing in the Fall—I’ll let you know how it is.

I meant to keep better track of all the books I’ve read this year, but I managed to lose track already. I thought I’d give a quick report of the last two books I’ve finished.

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel is every bit as good as the reviews made it out to be. One of my favorite writers, Mantel’s darkly comic novel tells the story of Alison, a professional medium, and her assistant Colette. A psychic you say? And a real one at that complete with a spirit guide, who causes no end of grief. Alison comes to terms with her dark past and Mantel slowly reveals the emergence of Alison’s “gift” while growing up in a really awful home. Colette meanwhile has broken with her husband of several years in a sort of attempt to wrest control of her life. She manages Alison’s career but at the same time hold her in contempt for many reasons one of which is her plus size. The dead demand Alison’s ear, not matter when or where she is and Mantel captures the dark, grittiness of the spirit world (which eerily doesn’t seem all that different from the world of the living). Not many authors do ugliness and unhappiness like Mantel and this book kept me turning pages both backwards and forwards as I read and reread.

On a lighter note, I picked up A Year in Japan by Kate Williamson because of its delightful cover. Princeton Architectural Press produced a high quality book complete with French flaps and gorgeous reproductions of Williamson’s illustrations of Japanese life. Like the title mentions, she spent a year in Japan observing the daily life and she did these wonderful illustrations of the small details she experienced. The book doesn’t take long to read—there’s not much text—but you can continually pick up the book, open it to a random page, and feast on a small bite, say about riding the shinkansen (the bullet train) or the wonderful socks she discovers there (who knew the Japanese loved socks so much). It’s a lovely book.

Based on the life of the author’s great-grandfather, The Leopard tells of proud Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (in Sicily), during the time of the Risorgimento, or the movement for unification in the 1860s. A man of great appetites, Fabrizio moves through a time where he is the head of his family and a natural leader of the Sicilian people. The chapters of this delightful novel each take place during a specified time period—the first four cover 1860 and the last four cover the next 20 years. The events of the book tell the story of a changing Sicily. Fabrizio knows not only that he’s an aging Prince, but also that he represents a dying era.

Written over the course of 25 years and only published after death, di Lampedusa understands the delicacies of human conversation. He also gets at the heart of man, proud by nature yet one who appreciates the subleties of life. Packed with details of late 19th century Italian life, The Leopard paints a wistful portrait of family whose fortune change even while they try to maintain the status quo. A delicious read, I found di Lampedusa’s novel difficult to put down.

Readers may be aware of my growing fondness for Rupert Thomson after I read his excellent Divided Kingdom last year. I vowed to make my way through his previous books. So far I’ve read The Insult and The Book of Revelations. Soft makes my fourth Thomson novel. I’d say that this is not his best work, but interesting nonetheless. One of the things I appreciate about Thomson the most is that each book is different. His plots differ radically.

Soft tells the story of three different characters with intertwined fates revolving around a new soft drink. In the first section, we meet Barker Dodds, former night club and barber. After some unpleasantness with a local family that thinks he killed one of their family members, he flees Plymouth for London, where he ends up with a job as a barber, but not before making friends with an unsavory character. Dodds can’t escape his violent past—and he knows it. Eventually he accepts a “job” before he even knows what it is, to kill a woman named Glade Spencer.

The next section follows Glade and tells the story of why Dodds must kill her. She’s an artist/waitress with an American boyfriend. Glade never seems connected with the real world, almost like an observer rather than a participant. When her boyfriend Tom invites her to a wedding in New Orleans, she accepts and then has to scrounge up money to buy a dress. Little does she know that by agreeing to participate in a sleep study, her life would change forever.

Then we move on to the third character, an ad executive named Jimmy Lynch. He finds himself the protege of his new American boss, who was brought in as a hired gun. Jimmy’s new ad campaign for Kwench! sets the whole plot in motion.

Glade, Dodds, and Jimmy’s stories come together in the last two sections of the book, though Jimmy never meets Dodds or Glade face to face. Thomson obviously means Soft to be a comment on consumer culture, yet it’s also a mystery. Even with such finely developed characters, the plot seems improbable, but I still found myself reading it eagerly.

How does one review a memoir that details living through the Rwandan genocide in 1994? Paul Rusesabagina, manager of the Hotel Milles Collines, writes about his experience during that dark time in his new memoir. If you’ve seen the movie Hotel Rwanda, which is based on his life, you’ve seen some of the most visceral, awful, blood filled parts. His memoir deals with the more personal aspects, rather than focusing on scenes that must have been too mind-boggling for the human mind to comprehend.

I worried when picking this book up for the first time that Paul Rusesabagina would come across as self-important, but instead he just sounds sincere. As he says, “I am a hotel manager who was doing his job. That is really the best you can say about me.” In just 100 days, over 800,000 people were slaughtered, many hacked to death by machetes, which had been imported for this strict purpose. He writes about the events that led up to this atrocity as well as weaving in the story of his childhood. We hear about his wise father, who taught him the verbal skills and help infuse him with the wiseness that would save himself, his family, and 1,268 people later on in 1994.

The tone of this book is incredibly personal. You can almost hear Rusesabagina telling you his story in one ear as you read. He refuses to believe that everyone is either good or evil. Each person has a bit of both inside and that’s what enabled him to live day to day. He believed that as long as he could find the soft part of a person, he could win any negotiation. He sat with some of the main men behind the genocide, and even though he was harboring wanted Tutsis, was able to keep the hotel as a safe haven for several months. He dismisses the criticism from those who wonder how he could be friendly with such killers. He was only thinking about saving the people in his hotel. Evil men or not, they had the power to let the killers in or to keep them outside at the gate. Rusesabagina’s sincerity paints this entire memoir. How any man could survive let alone with such humility leaves one feeling pretty humble.