Daniel’s Reviews > A Swim in a Pond in the Rain > Status Update

free at last!

Oh, I'm on a roll. It's that final lap sprint! On track to finish this in under a year! (No, really. I started this in March 2022.) On the downside, the final story is Tolstoy again, barf. But it's only 6 pages! Yay!

2 more stories to go...

Have to read the stories for the analysis to make sense, but I don't want to read the stories. I have not enjoyed any of them so far. Like, I have no idea when I last read Chekhov before I picked up this book, like probably decades ago. I remember nothing. But I'd swear the one I just read in this book was the worst story Chekhov ever wrote, including ones he probably burned unpublished.

A story is a frank, intimate conversation between equals. We keep reading because we continue to feel respected by the writer.

Ok, I appreciate the point he eventually gets to in his commentary about not getting to choose the type of writer you turn out to be, but OMG the Turgenev story was awful.