Sunday 7 June 2009

The Sunday Salon: Short Story review and other related stuff

It's been a strange old day weather wise here in England, this morning was raining so hard and cold I put the heating on, then I popped to the supermarket and boiled, the sun had dried all the puddles in a matter of hours and now the sky looks just about ready to burst again.
In terms of reading I seem to be falling really behind again, I joined a new gym and have been spending more time there than at the last one, I had a reading funk for a while and I have so many reading commitments I'm reading 4 or 5 books at one and have a massive pile that needs tackling.
This week I'll hopefully finish: an audiobook The Absolutely True Story of a Part Time Indian (fantastic), Inkheart (fantastic), The Lost Dog (mmm haven't got into it yet and its a bookring so need to speed up), The Hard Facts of the Grimm Fairy Tales (due back to the library next weekend) and The Bonesetter's Daughter (a bookcrossing read-a-long that finishes Saturday).
I also didn't realise that Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge finished in June, I was convinced it was July so I have to finish Inkheart plus 2 other books for that in the next 2 weeks!


visited 2 states (0.88%)
Create your own visited map of The World or Like this? try: The Next President

The Orbis Terratum Short Story Mini Challenge as some of you may have read I'm hosting this mini challenge for Bethany's Orbis Terrarum challenge. Participants need to read 10 short stories from 10 different countries, between June 1st and Sept 1st. Prizes will be avaliable at the end of the challenge.
As I like to test myself I'm trying to see how far around the world I can get. Today I'm visiting Germany the second country on my travels.

How Old Timofei Died with a Song by Rainer Maria Rilke
Opening line: "What a real joy it is to tell stories to a paralyzed person."
The narrator in this tale reguarly tells stories to a local paralysed man. In this story she tells him how in the past stories where alive, they were kept alive by being passed orally from person to person, commited to memory and passed along to the next generation. The narrator claims that once a story is no longer remembered and can only be told through reading it in a book it is no longer alive.
Timofei was the villages storyteller, he remembered all the oldest stories and went through the town passing on stories to everyone in hearing distance, when Timofei had children only oe of them had the gift of storytelling, the others like the others in the village forgot what they had been told. Timofei saw it as his sole responsilbilty to pass on each and every story to his son so the community's stories could still live on.

I'm looking for more participants, so if you'd like to join a challenge that you could complete in a day or use to take you on your travels this summer see here for further details


See what I read when I 'visited' France here

3 comments:

serendipity_viv said...

You made me laugh about the weather today. I know what you mean - I have changed my clothes three times alternating between jumpers and shorts.

i didnn't realise Carl's challenge finished so soon other.

gautami tripathy said...

I think I will join it. I read a lot of short stories. Online or otherwise. But you know that!

Tea and Other Ayama Na Tales

Unknown said...

I like your challenge. I'll post a link to it this Sunday. Maybe it will send some traffic your way.

I may join in, too. I have to check out my anthologies, make sure I can cover ten countries.