ingrid

A time of instability and change

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Ask Me About Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

Every day you get a picture of my dog, Whimsy.

There will be posts about books.

Also, apparently, opera.



I fell in love with A.S. Byatt in high school, reading her novel "Possession", and devoured what I could find of her works in my local library thereafter, which I recall being entirely short story collections. I genuinely cannot remember, however, if "Elements: Stories of Fire and Ice" was one of them. I have distinct memories of one of the stories -- a fairytale about an ice princess -- but none of the others seem familiar. Byatt's short story collections are hardly voluminous, so it seems unlikely that she would have the same story in multiple books. It may be more likely that on reading the stories in high school, the one that struck me most vividly was the fairytale one, while the other stories -- about impulsive actions taken in the face of grief, about choosing the artistic life over the social life and where inspiration is found, about art and devotion, about how suddenly someone outside the group norm can fall even further from society -- spoke to me less as a teenager than they do at 39.


I appreciated everything this time around, although Byatt is the sort of author who rewards rereading, informed by Byatt the writer, Byatt the critic, and Byatt the appreciator of art. There's a richness to her stories, a painterly quality, like works in oil or acrylic, texture to the brain.

I heard a guest on a podcast recently expressing frustration in the book they were discussing because of how so much of the book felt like flourishes, things being built that never 'paid off' in terms of the plot and nothing reminds me more thoroughly of the importance of reading outside of genre fiction, of ignoring a marketing publisher push to view prose in terms of its compatibility with screenplays, than luxuriating in one of Byatt's short stories.

There's so many ways to appreciate books and it's awesome when you unlock that.


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