I feel like Bilbo Baggins addressing the Shire on his eleventieth birthday party:
“I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”
I like exactly two of the stories in this collection a LOT and like when I get opportunities to reread but especially read them aloud or have them read aloud.
And then I didn’t really care that much for almost any other in the whole collection. It would take me 600 years to built up the appreciation for the others like I did with those two. So I ended up not engaging very much with vast bulk of this book.
Those two stories are so good and so funny.
The two stories in question are “I Bought a Little City” in which a man deeply ill-equipped to be mayor of a small town — Galveston Texas in this case ends up running the city and does not do well by it. The other one is “The Classroom” in which a series of animals die at the hands of an elementary school teacher who’s trying both too hard and not hard enough.
These are deeply irreverent and absurd stories and that, combined with their length challenge me to put with them for very long. The tone is very effective and the writing is very consistent, but I just couldn’t. In the end, I think I realize maybe I should have left my appreciation where it was after I didn’t connect with the first ten or so.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Penguin-Classics-Donald-Barthelme/dp/0142437395/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=sixty+stories&qid=1557493919&s=gateway&sr=8-1)
