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

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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:

The Gunslinger by Stephen King – A Short Story Review

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I read the short story The Gunslinger by Stephen King (40 pages and 3, 25 minute train rides with intermittent naps throughout). As always, I love the way that Stephen King writes: great descriptions of the scene around the main character, intriguing character development, and always some sort of savage killing scene, often told in a perspective that is very dream-like. This story was no exception. The gunslinger is a gun-toting badass who’s on the chase trying to track down a sorcerer across the desert. Most of the story however, is told through a flashback of his visit to the town of Tull (just before the desert and recently visited by the sorcerer) where he meets a man that the sorcerer had brought back to life in a bar. All of the things in this town may or may not be traps laid by the sorcerer, trying to slow down the gunslinger’s chase. So in the mean time, the gunslinger sleeps with the bartender/owner several times, meets the town preacher (who was impregnated by the sorcerer who told her that he was actually an angel), then the gunslinger performs an abortion (with his handgun?!?!), and then on his way out of the town he gets attacked and subsequently kills everyone who lives in the town. He gets stabbed several times in the process but kills several men, women, and even children.

The way the story was told (dream-like, flashback, science-fictiony and sort of post-apocalyptic) was very cool but I wasn’t bought into the fact that he had to kill everyone in the town in order to escape, I found it lacked a little creativity (just shoot ALL YOUR AMMO and people will love it). I expected him to have to kill a few people and do something interesting to make his escape but when the entire town suddenly went crazy and he had to kill everyone, I kind of lost my taste for the story. I mean I like rambo, shoot-em-up stories as much as anyone, but I felt the ending and escape from Tull was a bit lacking. I’ve heard though that the rest of the Dark Tower series is awesome and totally worth reading despite the lackluster storytelling in the first book.

About the Author Stephen King:

Stephen King is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are the Dark Tower novels, Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything’s Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and Bag of Bones. His acclaimed nonfiction book, On Writing, was also a bestseller. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. (Courtesy of Amazon.com)

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