Just finished reading Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri, a collection of short stories that I really enjoyed! I wasn't sure if I would enjoy reading a collection of short stories; I'd previously thought of short story collections as cheating the reader out of the joy of losing one's self in a world that can only be fully experienced over the course of 200 or more pages. It seemed to me that the constant ending and starting over would become annoying. But I was wrong. The stories were long enough that I was fully engaged with the characters as I rode the arcs of their entanglements and trials. And the stories all seemed to end at the right place, as if the reader is privy to only so much of the characters' lives, like those friends that come and go during sections of our own lives, our lives continuing on even after we've lost touch, the continuation of the characters' lives implied as the reader moves on to the next story. Now I want to read her Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Interpreter of Maladies.
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