Reading short stories challenge 2020

[Christi]

I don't think I'll be able to finish most of them in a week, or at least not the ones I'm reading right now (I read intensively and stop once I've reached a certain amount of words). Will finish one this month and will post a review then, if that's allowed

[Serpent]

I don't think I'll be able to finish most of them in a week, or at least not the ones I'm reading right now (I read intensively and stop once I've reached a certain amount of words). Will finish one this month and will post a review then, if that's allowed

Sure Also just to clarify, the point was that you can't count a story unless you finished it. You can begin it this week, finish it next week and count it (as long as you read one full page within the next week, as that's the week you're counting it for).

I keep forgetting about my own challenge This week's story is Horacio Quiroga - Los desterrados, the one the whole book was named after. It has some spoilers for other stories in the collection. The main characters are Brazilian and there's a lot of portuñol (translated into Spanish in the footnotes, at least in my edition).

[Serpent]

one more story is called van-Houten (sic) which is a Dutch name.

Well I read it last week. The longer stories are more fun because there's more happening than just death There's some challenging talk about wells and canoes but it's pretty easy to get the gist. There's also a questionable statement about a native American (Paraguayan) character.
Van-Houten is indeed Dutch (Flemish) but you forget about that quickly because he's mostly addressed/referred to as don Luis.

I've now read 5/8 stories in the book. Might leave the remaining ones for the Super Challenge as each of them is over 20 pages long.

[Serpent]

Also!!! I opened the book "Cuentos fantásticos modernistas de Hispanoamérica" and realized I had read many stories, probably in 2015 or so? Wow. Seems like I've read most of those under 5-7 pages.

I still keep picking the shortest stories This week I've read Finis desolatrix veritas by Abraham Valdelomar. It's pretty gloomy and depressing, I probably wouldn't have forced myself to finish it today without the challenge.
May be nice if you like "end of the world" kind of stories

I plan to read something by Luis Sepúlveda who recently died of covid.

[Serpent]

Wow I was reckless in 2009
Just reread Avventura deserta ovvero ultimo dei romantici by Massimo Bontempelli, which was one of the first stories I ever read in Italian. At the time I was mostly familiar with football vocabulary and hadn't ever come across passato remoto. This particular story also includes magical realism (it's from a collection called Racconti fantastici). Some lines were really familiar, I must've stared at them for ages There were still some words that I don't think I've seen anywhere even by now, but I didn't bother to look them up.

Yesterday I also read Pirandello's Di sera, un geranio. I might have read it before as it's one of the shortest stories in the book, but I definitely didn't remember anything before I (re)read the whole thing. I'm counting it for the challenge (for last week).

In the previous weeks I read two stories from Antonio Tabucchi's collection "Piccoli equivoci senza importanza". I bought the book in 2012 along with a bunch of other Italian books someone was selling - I guess I looked up the author, found out that he'd admired Fernando Pessoa and translated his poetry into Italian (I don't think I had even read any Pessoa by then), and I decided I wanted to read his book. (it was cheap) Honestly, so far it's a disappointment. I loved some descriptions of Lisbon (there's also a mention of Sporting drawing with Real Madrid - must've been a fictional match?), some medical stuff, but other than this... meh. The stories I've read so far are Stanze and Any where out of the world [sic].