Today we discover that the best writing is writing that doesn’t show its workings.
What I gleaned about the stories: To each outsider, it is the rest of the world that is colouring outside the lines.
Find this book on Amazon.
Analysis: I was flowing through these stories, barely even noticing the breaks between stories, when I struck “Christianicists”. I don’t vocalise under my breath as I read, but it still felt like my tongue had become tangled. So I had to go back and take another run-up to unpack how the word should sound.
Unfortunately, this gave another part of my mind long enough to realise the word was neither “Christians” nor “Christianists”, and drag me off into seeking the meaning.
Re-reading the entire paragraph, I deduced it from context, but by that point I was thinking about the difficulty of reading that sentence on several levels.
I surged past 40:00 minutes without hitting another odd word, so this might have been the only tripping hazard in otherwise smooth prose.
Analysis: From protagonists living among nomadic alien tribes to recovering coma victims, each narrator described events not by the differences from a common normality but the differences from what the narrator thought was normal.
Analysis: Perhaps the greatest indication of quality is that I was so immersed in the stories that I wasn’t consciously aware of common techniques.
I will definitely be reading the rest of this collection for enjoyment.
And then reading it again to analyse the technique.
Is this book gone now? That’s a pity.
It may just be the ebook that is gone. The print edition seems to still be there, so I’ve updated the link.