Short Story Books
As anyone who knows me must realise by now, I love the short story form.
I initially thought it would be interesting to see how many short stories I can read a day in a year… too much pressure so instead this is just a way to log and post about what I’m reading.
Then I thought that the posts I would do would be a bit too big for Bluesky and a bit too short for a blog post and was wondering what to do.
I then remembered that I have a Ko-Fi and since I really want to start using it a bit more Ko-Fi is where the individual short story review will go when I have finished reading a short story and once I’ve finished a whole book I’ll make a review post on the Big Bearded Bookseller blog for it.
I’ve already completed quite a few anthologies and collections and will link them here but will re-read them and add little reviews to the Ko-Fi as I get through them.
If it’s a stand-alone short story I’ll just link directly to the Ko-Fi rambling from this page.
First of all there will be the obligatory list of books I’ve already got to read from (in progress) and each book will get it’s own post, and the way I’m going to choose is to use a random number generator to choose a book and then read the next one in that book:
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: April 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: March 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: February 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: January 2011
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: December 2010
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: October 2021
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: September 2010
- Asimov’s Science Fiction: August 2010
- The Book of Newcastle: A City in Short Fiction
- Bloody Scotland: 10th Anniversary
- Conan Omnibus: The Young Swordsman
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
- The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft: 67 Tales of Horror
- The Devil and the Giro: The Scottish Short Story
- The Devourer Below
- Dragon Lords and Warrior Women
- Extinct Doesn’t Mean Forever
- famished
- The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
- First Contact: Digital Science Fiction Anthology 1
- Fritz Leiber Super Pack #1
- Ghost Stories of Antiquity
- Ghost Stories of Antiquity Part 2: More Ghost Stories
- Ghost Tales, Volume 1
- Her Body and Other Parties
- Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories
- Household Tales
- Infinite Stars
- Infinities
- Isolation: The Horror Anthology
- The Kimota Anthology
- Kzine Issue 1
- Kzine Issue 2
- Kzine Issue 3
- Life Ceremony
- Lost Mars: The Golden Age of the Red Planet
- The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
- The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF
- The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (20th Anniversary Edition)
- The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF
- The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF
- The Mammoth Book of SF Short Stories by Women
- The Mammoth Book of SF Wars
- The Mammoth Book of Steampunk
- Menace of the Monster: Classic Tales of Creatures from Beyond
- Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventure
- My Pen is the Wing of a Bird
- The New Abject
- New Suns
- Palestine +100: stories from a century after the Nakba
- Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
- Past the Borders: Collected Science Fiction
- The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories
- The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
- Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories
- Reverse Engineering II
- The Road to Dune
- Robert E. Howard Ultimate Collection
- Salt Slow
- The Second Conan Omnibus: The Master Swordsman
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2016 Edition
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2019 Edition
- Some of the Best from Tor.com 2021 Edition
- Tales of Dune: Expanded Edition
- Tales of Mystery & the Macabre
- There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales
- Things in the Dark: A Fox Pocket Anthology
- The Time Traveller’s Almanac
- Twenty Tiny Tales by Willie Wat
- Twenty Tiny Tales and a few tails
- Vampires Never Get Old: Tales with Fresh Bite
plus many more sci-fi, horror, and fantasy collections I got on the Kindle ages ago, and I’ll be adding more collections/anthologies to this list as I go along.
So the plan is to read a short story a day(ish), write something about it on Ko-Fi, then post about that on Bluesky.
If you have a favourite collection or anthology that I’ve missed why not let me know?
