Dipping In

Have been skittishly promiscuous in my reading of late. Why should I be jumping from book to book when I could be faithfully embracing in its turn each and every of Flannery O'Connor's brilliant short stories in the fabulous Library of America Collected Works? There's enough there to preclude even glancing at anything else for at least a month.

I suppose it's because each story is such a heady, powerful experience that I feel the need to get away for a while before becoming seduced by the next. After reading A Late Encounter With The Enemy the other day, and not quite knowing whether to laugh, cry or scream with horror, I really couldn't get started on the following Good Country People until I felt ready to take a fresh plunge into the dark waters of Miss O'Connor's imagination - in which I'm now drowning again.

Sometimes it's nice to stay in the shallows.