Tag Archives: j.d. salinger

5 Great and 5 Not-So-Great Short Stories for Your Train Commute

Posted on by
Reply

The point of this month’s 30 Day Lifestyle Experiment was to expand on and to improve the experience of my daily commute to/from work each day.  I spend anywhere from 7-10 hours per week (364-520hrs/year) commuting so why not try to make that chunk of my life better?  Back in September I did another public transit experiment where I had one new conversation per day with strangers on my commute to work.  That experiment actually resulted in many casual friendships and now I routinely chat with people while waiting for the train or even for the entire ride.  Even though I find it to be fun and fulfilling, I can’t just chat up people on the train every day, most of the time I just read books or take naps.  I thought about reading poetry, essays, or speeches but eventually selected short stories because I’ve been reading books on my commute to work for a few years but still I’ve only been through a handful of different authors.  Therefore I felt that reading a new short story every day would be a good way to find new authors that I might like.

I soon realized how perfect short stories were for train commuting, I’m sold and I highly recommend giving them a try.  It can be difficult to immerse yourself in a long novel (depending on the length of your commute).  I can generally get through 10-15 pages of a dense book during my commute, so you can see how reading a 500 page book only 10 pages at a time can be kind of annoying.  Especially for a really intense book, hopping in and out of the plot can be tough.  The short story was perfect because you can read most of them from start to finish in about 20 minutes.  Some of the deeper yet shorter books I actually read twice during the same commute.  There was something gratifying about finishing a story on the way to work, I felt like I had accomplished something during a time where had I been driving, I’d simply be sitting in traffic.

I started off getting all of my books from the Boston Public Library, which worked great because I did it all online.  You can go online, login, reserve books, the staff will find them for you, and then you can pick them up at your convenience.  However, this can take 5 business days and eventually lacking the foresight to do this ahead of time, I only managed to do it for the first two weeks.  I found it much easier to do a Google search for a pdf of the short story and then just read them on my computer.  What took me 45 minutes in a library (not counting the walking to and from) only took me 15 seconds on my computer using Google… and the internet wins again.  I could have also gone with the Kindle route but I didn’t want to spend the money on one and didn’t get around to borrowing a friends’.

As expected, there were some stories that I really liked, some that I really disliked, and a bunch that were somewhere in the middle.  Here are my personal recommendations on 5 great and 5 not-so-great short stories for the young and urban train commute.

Great:

  • The Second Bakery Attack by Haruki Murakami – In an attempt to lift a curse off their lives, two newlyweds robbed a MacDonalds at 3am for 20 Big Macs… and they lived happily ever after.  I thought the story was told really well, it was a very interesting read, and I didn’t expect the ending.  Great for a short read on the train.
  • To Build a Fire by Jack London – A fantastic story of (not) survival in the heart of an Alaskan winter.  It came to me recommended by many people and I’ll turn around and recommend it to others, it was captivating through and through.
  • The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber – Walter Mitty leads a painfully boring life so he routinely  escapes to alternate fantasy realities where he’s the world’s best trauma surgeon, a WWII pilot, a man on trial for murder and others.  His fantasies took me right into the plot and his unfortunate reality I recognize everywhere and empathized with.
  • The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe – A man murders his elderly housemate and when the police come to investigate, the sound of the old man’s beating heart drives him insane and he confesses.  A classic we all read in middle school but totally worth revisiting as an “adult”.
  • Eiger Dreams by Jon Krakauer – A tale of Krakauer’s defeat on the Eiger’s legendary north face.  I’m bias toward adventure stories and while this may not be the most classic short story out there, I loved it.  I also recommend the audiotape version, particularly if it’s winter and it’s snowing outside.  This story came in a book of adventure short stories, all of which I’m planning to read soon.

Not So Great:

  • The Use of Force by William Carlos Williams – An uncomfortably creepy story about a doctor who is in romance with the pain of his patients, especially a little girl with a throat infection.  I didn’t find the story to be engaging and I couldn’t empathize with any of the characters.  Simply a creepy doctor with a fetish for pain, I don’t recommend it.
  • A Perfect Day for Banana Fish by J.D. Salinger  – This girl has a sketchy boyfriend, she takes a nap, he comes in from the beach… and then blows his brains out in their hotel room while she sleeps.  That’s pretty much the whole story right there, I’d rather read the story about her waking up and the events afterward.  I definitely wouldn’t read it again.
  • The Happy Man by Jonathan Lethem – A man’s soul will routinely leave the real world to visit hell.  The only way to leave Hell is to visit the Happy Mal, a colonel who rapes him repeatedly. The story was told very well, dream-like and captivating, I’m just not that into brutal raping and child molestation.  It had so much potential, but stories of repressed sexual abuse just don’t jive well with my train commute.
  • In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka – An officer explains an elaborate torture device that he manages for his country’s army despite it having been out of favor with everyone for a long time.  He realizes this and then uses it on himself in hopes for a glorified death.  However, instead of the intricate and somehow spiritual death he’s always dreamed of, it malfunctions and brutally kills him.  On a scale from 1-10 I give it an, “Eh”.
  • The Gunslinger by Stephen King – A gunslinger is chasing a sorcerer through the desert.  Sounds awesome right?  However, instead of any chasing, the story includes him repeatedly having sex with a large ugly barmaid and then the story ends with him shooting every living person in the town and leaving for the desert.  I’ve heard the rest of the series is better, but I wouldn’t recommend this as a short story on its own.

Other Notable Books from my Train Commute this Month:

To see more of the books I’ve read and reviewed, check out my virtual bookshelf from Shelfari.com:

A Perfect Day for Bananafish by J.D. Salinger – A Short Story Review

Posted on by
Reply

I picked up the book “Nine Stories” by J.D. Salinger from the library because it came recommended by friends and I had also just finished reading Catcher in the Rye and liked that a lot. I selected “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” mostly because the title popped out in the table of contents.  I read that it was originally published in the New Yorker which is a good sign, plus I was interested to see why he chose that title.

In classic Salinger style, he moves the plot in real-time through conversation and thought. In this short story, it became clear that a girl had run away to live and travel with her psychotic boyfriend. It started with her in her hotel room on a long distance phone conversation with her mother who was rightly concerned for her safety but the girl wouldn’t have it and didn’t want to be told what to do. The story then changed to the perspective of the psychotic man, who in reality didn’t seem too crazy at all. One of the little girls on the beach made friends with him and she actually coaxed him into the water. He was wearing a bath robe because his pale skin was sensitive to the sun. Finally he got into the water and splashed around with the little girl and told her of the Bananafish. Bananafish swim around looking for bananas which grow in these little holes in the ocean floor. The only trouble is that once inside the hole, they eat so many bananas that they get too fat to exit the hole. That’s why no one has ever seen one.  At one point while they were swimming around he kissed her foot and she said, “Hey!” and took off back to her parents. He then headed back to the hotel room, saw his “girlfriend” sleeping on the bed, grabbed his pistol, loaded a magazine, and shot himself through his right temple.

I’m not sure that I enjoyed this story. It was short and the narrative was very readable but a plot that I largely didn’t care about. I tried to read deeper into the relationship between the girlfriend and her psychotic boyfriend as well as his relationship with the little girl, but even then I just couldn’t get engaged. Then in the very last sentence he kills himself. I do have to say that I wasn’t expecting the suicide and it literally happened in one sentence with no obvious lead up to it. The ending of the story came as a shock and I spent some time thinking about it imagining the girlfriend waking up to a gun shot three feet from her and finding him dead with a hole in his head and the resulting hotel and police actions, etc.  I actually liked this part better than the whole rest of the story. So ‘A’ for effort on the surprise ending, but I still give the story 2 stars because I wouldn’t consider reading it again and I surely wouldn’t recommend it to any friends or family.

About the Author J.D. Salinger:

Born in New York in 1919, Jerome David Salinger dropped out of several schools before enrolling in a writing class at Columbia University, publishing his first piece (“The Young Folks”) in Story magazine. Soon after, the New Yorker picked up the heralded “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” and more pieces followed, including “Slight Rebellion off Madison” in 1941, an early Holden Caulfield story. Following a stint in Europe for World War II, Salinger returned to New York and began work on his signature novel, 1951′s “The Catcher in the Rye,” an immediate bestseller for its iconoclastic hero and forthright use of profanity. Following this success, Salinger retreated to his Cornish, New Hampshire, home where he grew increasingly private, eventually erecting a wall around his property and publishing just three more books: “Nine Stories,” “Franny and Zooey,” “Raise High the Roof Beam, and Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.” Salinger was married twice and had two children. He died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, in New Hampshire at the age of 91.  (Courtesy of Amazon.com)

To see more of the books I’ve read and reviewed, check out my virtual bookshelf from Shelfari.com: