Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge June 10, 2020

The Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge is hosted by Long and Short Reviews.  This week’s topic is: favorite poems, short stories, or novellas.

Geez, I haven’t done one of these since April?  Yikes, sorry guys.  Life has come at me head on these last few weeks.  More so than usual.

Anyway, I love today’s topic because I’ve always found short stories and novellas to be a great way to get to know a new author.  A lot of people hate them, think that you can’t really develop a charater in a hundred pages, but I think that a truly skilled author can do exactly that.  Also, while poetry really isn’t my kind of thing, I had a couple of really great English teachers in high school who managed to find the kind of poetry that even a teenage could appreciate.

So, today, like Doc Holliday, I have one for each of ya.  Or something like that.

Poems

“Delight in Disorder” by Robert Herrick is a rather short poem, but it packs a serious punch of eroticism.  Simple and straightforward, it’s not offensive or explicit, but you know exactly what’s going on and can’t help but be left a bit breathless in the end.  It left a strong impression on me.  You can find the poem here.

“A Dream Within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe is probably one of his lesser known poems, but has long been a favorite of mine.  When I was younger, the lyrical flow and earnestness of it stirred my emotions, making me wonder, is this all real?  As an adult, one who has experienced a lot in the last couple of years, it resonates even more.  I’m not sure what he was really getting at here, but the first verse feels like the hopefulness of youth while the second is the harsh realities of life.  You can find this beauty here.

Short Stories

“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel García Márquez was one of the first stories I remember reading in English class in high school. It was the story that got me hooked on the author and made me fall in love with magical realism.  I also sort of fell in love with the name Esteban after this story, too, but that’s really neither here nor there, is it?  You can read it here or, if you’re so inclined, you can listen to it being read.  I giggled when I stumbled across this this morning (yes, I am an epic dork and a huge nerd, sue me.)

Novellas

I read a lot of novellas but Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx is by far one of my absolute favorites.  After finding a copy at my library, I made the mistake of sitting down to read this before work one morning.  Needless to say, I was late because I spent a good ten minutes ugly crying after I finished it.  Despite being an overly emotional kind of person, I don’t usually cry a lot while reading.  Tear up, sure.  Get emotional?  All the time.  But only one other book has ever done this to me and that was John Patterson’s Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas.  Yeah, and that one I was reading AT work, so you know, that was fun.  Because I had such a visceral reaction to the story itself, I’ve been hesitant to wach the movie, but I will get there some day. I’m not going to link to a bootleg copy of this book, but you can find it on Goodreads here (and then choose your retailer from there).