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emmalthompson85's review
3.0
This is quite a strange book, really. It's a collection of short stories but even now I've not sure what the unifying theme is meant to be. I liked the idea of stories to get you through the night, which I thought meant stories to bring you through those dark hours on nights where sleep won't come, and we've all had those nights. I'm not sure the collection works as that, though there are no doubt some lovely stories in it.
The stories collected here were generally classics and of a high quality, I'm not disputing that, but I think the link between them was tenuous and that took away a little of my enjoyment of this as a collection for me.
The stories collected here were generally classics and of a high quality, I'm not disputing that, but I think the link between them was tenuous and that took away a little of my enjoyment of this as a collection for me.
inkcharm's review
3.0
What inticed me about this short story collection was the way it had been designed. Stories sorted by different categories, stories that you can supposedly read before retiring to bed, stories that will suit a certain mood. However, I found the stories mostly feel short of that goal. They were great stories in themselves, but the completely uneven page count and lack of cohesive theme or mood made it difficult to dive into the book as a whole. Maybe it would have been better to read the short stories individually, completely detached from the themes the book tries to set up with them.
thebookheap12's review
3.0
picked up this anthology, I admit it, because of the beautiful, beautiful cover. I spotted it on the shelves in Waterstones just before my birthday and before I knew it, I was buying it. I’m not personally a lover of short stories, I prefer stories I can bury myself in for a couple of nights at a time and get lost in. But this collection works well together.
I picked this up because I spotted a range of authors within the book whom I’d always wanted to read the works of, but wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy them- so for example, the book features writers such as Virginia Woolf, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Haruki Murakami, Katherine Mansfield. Whilst I have previously read Sir Conan Doyle’s works (FIVE ORANGE PIPS NEEDS TO BE MADE INTO A THING NOW PLEASE.), and I have previously read the much loved Haruki Murakami, whose work I can’t say I’m a fan of (cue the internet gasp)- I’d not yet read any of Woolf and Mansfield etc, so I saw this book as a good opportunity to get a light idea of what their writing is like. And that is exactly what I think anthologies like this are good for.
Some of the stories were only two or three pages long and some were pushing 20 pages by themselves, so there is a wide variety of stories. The stories themselves are arranged into specific categories within the book: “Stories to make you glad to be alive”, “Stories to send a shiver up your spine”, “Stories to read when everything is going wrong”…
I enjoyed a lot of these stories and I recommend this book to people who wish to read more of popular authors, if only just to get an idea what their writing habits are like.
For more of my reviews, Please visit TheBookHeap
http://thebookheap.wordpress.com/
I picked this up because I spotted a range of authors within the book whom I’d always wanted to read the works of, but wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy them- so for example, the book features writers such as Virginia Woolf, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Haruki Murakami, Katherine Mansfield. Whilst I have previously read Sir Conan Doyle’s works (FIVE ORANGE PIPS NEEDS TO BE MADE INTO A THING NOW PLEASE.), and I have previously read the much loved Haruki Murakami, whose work I can’t say I’m a fan of (cue the internet gasp)- I’d not yet read any of Woolf and Mansfield etc, so I saw this book as a good opportunity to get a light idea of what their writing is like. And that is exactly what I think anthologies like this are good for.
Some of the stories were only two or three pages long and some were pushing 20 pages by themselves, so there is a wide variety of stories. The stories themselves are arranged into specific categories within the book: “Stories to make you glad to be alive”, “Stories to send a shiver up your spine”, “Stories to read when everything is going wrong”…
I enjoyed a lot of these stories and I recommend this book to people who wish to read more of popular authors, if only just to get an idea what their writing habits are like.
For more of my reviews, Please visit TheBookHeap
http://thebookheap.wordpress.com/
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