Fiction in Bite Size

I read these days much like I paint or do research: in bite sizes, with a clear frame around the time it takes to start, do, and be done. That means short stories for fiction that take a morning moment to read, 1ft X 1ft paintings in coarse brush stokes that each take an evening to do, and well, research, research that gels over travels and showers, written in hungry taps when time can be snatched.

On a recent flight, I had a choice to read: a pile of paper, or a collection of short stories. I chose the later, this being a birthday gift, several days before my birthday. It was a collection of short stories curated by Haruki Murakami called Birthday Stories (a good review with contents; my fave is Lynda Sexson's "Turning"), and it comes with a preface by Murakami describing his birthday moment that got him started on the collection, and a piece written by him tacked on to the dozen or so gems, most of them curiously Murakami-esque, others less so, each comes with a short note from Murakami and his voice carries through the stories and tie them together. Has a lot of bark. Great book to bite into it.