Books like Where You Find It

On Tuesday morning I took this book on the subway to start reading it. I had already read the first story, a wonderfully uncomfortable study of Valentines Day (and the reference from the front cover where one of the minor characters makes heart shaped sandwiches for her construction worker husband. Upon taking the book out of my bag I realized, 'oh shit, this book has a giant heart on the front and the whole book is bright pink--it looks like chick lit'. Normally I try not to bring books I'd be embarrassed to read in public with me on the train, or books I don't want the wrong type of person to think I'm a fellow-traveler (ie., evangelical) and think it proper to strike up a conversation. But now here I was on a crowded train reading a bright pink book with hearts on it. I don't know why I should feel embarrassed, what the fuck do I care what these other people think of me, me with the hair still looking like I just got out of bed, wearing pants with unfashionable holes in them. Why am I oblivious to the way that I look most days, or at least so much as I don't think about what other people will think of it (I'm thinking of this now only in introspection), but I got all freaked out by reading a bright pink book? I don't know why.I thought in my head that I'd explain how great and depressing her first novel was. Like anyone would say anything to me about the pink book. But maybe I just ran though possible conversation responses in my head to counter other things I thought people might be thinking. Feeling awkward reading the book was probably good though, because these stories are all about the awkwardness of different types of relationships. Most of these stories are probably worth more than three stars. Some maybe only three stars, and one or two I'd only give two stars too, but that is probably my fault in not getting what was going on. The stories range from being pretty straight forward dissections of relationships and the unbridgeable difficulties of dealing with anyone, all the compromises and shit that goes into them; to very abstract experiments in narration that make even figuring out who the characters are a chore. I'm all for difficult texts, but some of these were just too obtuse for me, in a four page story there just isn't enough room to be utterly confused about who is being talked about, who the narrator is supposed to be, and what just what is going on. This is where I blame myself, I could have read closer, or maybe what I was looking to figure out in these cases wasn't even there to be figured out. My big problem with this book is that most of the stories are fine, but reading them one after another is numbing. Short story collections by an author are unnatural things. Most of the time (but not always) the stories in them were never meant to be read one after another. The placement of them in a book with other stories book ending them changes the context of the stories and the way that I would approach each story if I had just come across it on it's own. The change that the materiality of a short story collection gives to each individual story in the collection I personally feel is for the worse, it takes away the uniqueness of each story and adds them in unintentional ways to structure they were never meant to reside in. Sort of like looking at a poster or a reproduction of Dali's artwork, yeah they look really good, sort of epic in their landscape and details, but then when you see Persistence of Memory in person hanging on the wall of MOMA and see how small it really is (I mean really really small), you realize that the whole context of the reproductions has distorted experience one would have when faced with the original in it's nude original context (of course you don't ever face this painting in it's nude context, since it's hanging in fucking MOMA and that is a context, even if you'd never heard of Dali before then you are encountering it in the context of 'masterpiece' just by it's placement in relatively the same spatiality of Starry Nights). I guess this is just a pompous way of saying the parts are better than the whole.