What I Loved

It's been awhile.
I'm sorry.
No, seriously, I'm really sorry. I've been reading, though, honest. This year, so far, I've already read 45 books and it's only October. I just had a very animated and heated (is that a bad thing? no, I think it's where you get very excited about something) discussion with some friends at work about books and we might start a book club. Now, I'm not holding my breath, because this will be the fourth book club that I have attempted to start. The other three fizzled because I was inevitably the only one who showed up and if not, I was the only one who showed up that had read the book and then finally, it was just me and another girl and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, which is never healthy.

I digress...

I just finished reading the world's shortest collection of short stories. I read them exclusively on the train and finished them in two and a half train rides (twice on the way to work and once on the way home). I've never read anything by Vapnyar before, but these stories were a perfect introduction to her style. Very short, sweet yet delicious. Is it weird that while she was describing raw broccoli, that my mouth began to water? Is it weird that sauteed spinach sounded a lot more enticing than the Special K that I was looking forward to this morning for breakfast? Each story didn't take more than 15 minutes to finish, but I was happy that she hadn't belabored each one. Sometimes writers feel that they need to flower everything, and they end up leaving the reader with as much emotion about the characters and the plotline than if they had cut out half of their story. Vapnyar knows exactly how much to give. It's almost as if she is a tease, because at the end of the last story, Slicing Sauteed Spinach, I wanted to know what was going to happen to the protagonist of the story as she made a crucial decision that would change her life. I'm glad I was left hanging, though, as it allowed me to imagine what might have been.