A Bit On the Side by William Trevor

I haven't been reading much fiction lately, and sadly, I can't remember the last time I read a book of short stories.

And now, thanks to reading William Trevor's book A Bit on the Side, I've been reminded all over again of the elegance and artistry of a really good short story.

An Irish writer, Trevor has a gift for describing how regular people face the harsh challenges of life. His touching and elegantly worded stories address our fallibility, our loneliness, our fundamental weakness.

His work reminds me a bit of Thomas Hardy, except his characters aren't quite such hapless victims of fate. His story Sacred Statues is a textbook Hardy-esque tragedy, a slow, grinding calamity where the reader hopes against all odds that things will work out for the main characters--yet the odds play out just as expected. Sitting with the Dead, the first story in this collection, is a brief and moving vignette about a woman greedy for what marriage might be, who paid for it with the best years of her life.

Readers familiar with the classic short stories of O. Henry will love William Trevor too. Let me qualify that: lovers of O. Henry will love William Trevor more, because they won't be forced to suspend disbelief and swallow implausible plot twists.

These stories were a gift to read, and I can't recommend them enough. If you're a fan of short fiction, you'll enjoy this book thoroughly.

Highly, highly recommended.

Empire, Incorporated by Philip J. Stern

Bluntly: this book is worth your attention if two things are true: 1) you're interested in the history of the early joint stock companies and their role in colonial history, and 2) you're willing to put up with a long, cluttered and disorganized book. Empire, Incorporated doesn't know what it really wants to be, and as a result author Philip Stern finds himself scattered everywhere, throwing at the wall anything and everything to do with mercantile-era joint stock companies. The book simply crawls with minutia to the point where even its own author at times gets his own lines crossed and loses his own thread. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] I'll critique the work more in another paragraph, but let's first ...

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch [spoilers]

A first-rate central concept inside a second-rate plot wrapper. After reading two Blake Crouch novels , Crouch's gift for concept is obvious, but writing believable and well-resolved narrative arcs is an area for improvement. We'll start with this novel's concept layer, the multiverse: the idea that there are an infinite number of possible universes, and with every choice we make, every fork in our road, a new separate universe will exist for any and all of these possible choices. Dark Matter is a story about a physicist, Jason Dessen, who figures out a way to place a human being into "superposition," enabling him to move from quantum universe to quantum universe, and even to choose which quantum universe to inhabit. [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commis...

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...

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