5/24/2023 0 Comments Tenth of december book review![]() ![]() ![]() Its format reminded me of Lincoln in the Bardo, with a fractured and jerking narrative. The third story I’ll carry with me after closing the book is The Semplica Girl Diaries. Frustrating as it is for the story to be short, this is the mark of an excellent one. Why and how did this become normal? Or was it instead some rogue experimentation? I wanted character development and back story. ![]() While it’s truly cringe-worthy, I also want to know more about this world. It was inventive world building, in which people are test subjects for drugs that deliver effects unlike our current pharmaceuticals. Saunders’ story Escape From Spiderhead was on the list, and is in this collection. While I was reading these, I saw a list of “creepy Halloween stories” or something similar. ![]() For example, in the titular story a chance encounter of a boy and a man leads to some unexpectedly chilling events. Primarily written from a male perspective, most of the characters are pretty mixed up. And that’s just what I look for in a collection. These stories are wry, insightful, and some are slightly disturbing. I think it helped me to have a sense for the way Saunders uses language and cadence in his writing. Nevertheless, I’m glad to have read them in this order. I’m late to the George Saunders party, having read the short stories in Tenth of December some months after his recent novel Lincoln in the Bardo. ![]()
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