J's Pages

This one is a book I won in a contest given by T5 at the Mysan's Corner message board. (His own site is the T5 Universe, but I digress.) Subtitled "Best Fantasy Stories", it's collection of short stories written between 1960 and 1989. Like one might expect from such a collection, the stories range in characters, location and style. If one tale doesn't strike your fancy, the next one will be quite different and perhaps more to your liking. I found the book to be a very interesting read. Mr. Aldiss is a very poetic writer--sometimes alluding to what's happening rather than spelling it out for you. This is more pronounced in the stories from the late sixties and early seventies, some of which I found to be downright confusing. But even those had an element of mood that touched me. Like I said, poetic. I'd be hard pressed to pick a single favorite. I enjoyed "A Romance of the Equator" for the way it describes love and its ending. In "The Blue Background" and "So Far from Prague", it was the way Aldiss described the setting and situations which caught my interest. "Consolations of Age" offered a good laugh. So, like any book that falls into my hands, I have to determine whether this one is worth keeping. I can't help but feel that these stories will be even better the next time around, so I'm putting this one on my shelf. 

LibraryThing link

Labels: OnMyShelf

// posted by John @ 5:12 PM