Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Only two weeks remain in "Short Fiction Month", after which I return to reading novels. Sigh....

:: I read five stories from Roald Dahl's collection, Tales of the Unexpected. My favorites were "A Dip in the Pool" and "The Hitchhiker", although everything by Dahl is great. This man had one wonderful, twisted imagination -- not horror per se, just one story after another riffing on the idea of "unintended consequences". Dahl's stories are markedly different from his children's fiction, although his grim outlook is not entirely lost in the children's novels. (He's best known for Charley and the Chocolate Factory, but my personal favorite is Danny, the Champion of the World -- which really should be a movie.)

:: I've often read testimonials to P.G. Wodehouse, especially that he is one of the funniest writers of all time. I had forgotten about a Wodehouse anthology I bought a few years back (The Most of P.G. Wodehouse) until now, and thus I figured, "Hey! It's short fiction month!" So I read two Wodehouse tales. The first, "The Purity of the Turf", was mildly amusing. It's a story about English gentlemen and their sporting interests, and it's clever and entertaining. But the second Wodehouse story I read -- "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald" -- was simply side-splitting. This thing had me laughing from beginning to end. I can't describe it much, except to note that it's about a dunderheaded clod who falls hopelessly in love, at first sight, with a lovely lady he spies across a street. This man's single undeniable talent, unfortunately, is his impression of a hen laying an egg. The way this talent plays into the story's denouement had me giggling and guffawing like a fool. And Wodehouse's gift for language is enormous, adding to the humor with descriptions like this: "It has often been said of Archibald that, had his brain been constructed of silk, he would have been hard put to it to find sufficient material to make a canary a pair of cami-knickers." And now I'm laughing again. Wait a minute....

:: This month has gone to show that if I'm saddened by all the novels I'll never get to read, I'm even more saddened by all the stories I'll never read.