Reading Challenge: Short Story Challenge

At the beginning of the year I condemned myself for not reading as many short stories collections as I should have. Unfortunately, I haven't really rectified that problem this year so when I came across a reading challenge from the Library of Clean Reads blog specifically to encourage reading short story collections I knew I had to participate. More details about the challenge can be found here.

I'm going for the 'Tales Galore' category which is seven to nine books, mainly because I already have seven collections sitting on my bookshelves. Here is the list so far:

1. Night Shivers - Charlotte Riddell
2. Sensation Stories - Wilkie Collins
3. Wish I Was Here - Jackie Kay
4. The New York Stories - Edith Wharton
5. The Collected Stories - Katherine Mansfield
6. Daughters of Decadence - Various
7. Touchy Subjects - Emma Donoghue
8. ???
9. ???

I'll add the final two collections later and the list is subject to change. I'm looking forward to delving into these collections, several of which have been festering on the shelf for quite some time. Although Riddell and Collins have links to my PhD work, I promise that this is all fun reading.

Amusing Summaries

As part of my PhD research I'm reading lots of sensation novels and trying to write a brief summary of events so that I don't get too muddled when trying to recall details of any particular book. Characters and plot melt into one mass of confusion if I'm not careful. It's just a document with a little about the progression of the plot and I include at the end quotations of contemporary reviews. However I just wrote a summary sentence for the past history of a character and snorted. 

• David Lloyd's Last Will, Hesba Stretton, 1870: "It’s mentioned that Mark lost a fiancé a decade ago when she fell off a cliff and he renounced marriage after that."

Is it just me or did anyone else snort? It makes it all sound so ridiculous. Yep, she fell off a cliff. In fairness to my summary, it sounds as stupid in the actual text. But, as a writer who struggles with writing synopses for her own work, I'm petrified of my plot sounding as contrived and melodramatic as that one. I've located a couple of these humorous summary sentences in my notes on other books.

• Robin Gray, Charles Gibbon, 1869: "Twenty years earlier McWhapple had been signed over property from Hugh Sutherland who it was suddenly rumoured had joined a conspiracy to overthrow the government."

• A Woman's Vengeance, James Payn, 1872: "Helen returns from the grave, confesses her sins then promptly dies." 

If I ever write anything like that in a synopsis I want to hang up my writing cap immediately and retire to a life of solitude with cats. I may yet do that anyway, to be fair. One final unrelated note garnered from my novel notes: don't change the sex of a baby half-way through a book.

• A Life's Assize, Charlotte Riddell, 1871: "Joy gives birth to a baby girl (text later suggests it’s a boy)."