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vnorthw

vnorthw

Currently reading

Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver
Freakangels, Volume 1
Warren Ellis, Paul Duffield
Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches' Guide to Romance Novels
Candy Tan, Sarah Wendell
The World Without Us
Alan Weisman
Looking for Group, Volume 1
Ryan Sohmer, Lar Desouza

Dancing Girls and Other Stories

Dancing Girls and Other Stories - Margaret Atwood A so-so collection of short fiction that took me forever to slog through.

The collection is dark, depressing and rather abstract in some stories. The main characters include a woman who appears to be suffering from some sort of schizophrenia and dementia, a woman being stalked by a foreign student, several couples in relationships that range from unhappy to adulterous, a counselor at a camp for children with disabilities, and a racist who insists on seeing new tenets in her building in their "native costumes."

Out of the 14 stories in the collection there were only 3 that I really liked.

As a reader of romance, I found Rape Fantasies to be rather interesting. The main character of the story has rape fantasies where she fends off the attacker by some stroke of luck - the would be rapist gets his zipper stuck and starts to cry that he's never been able to get anything right or some other such ridiculous thing. I thought it was a clever take on the idea

The other story I liked was A Travel Piece which is about a travel writer that ends up in a plane crash which leaves them stranded in life boats on the ocean for several days. It has a bit of a Lord of the Flies vibe too it.