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I am reading Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, and I wonder how many others have read it, what they thought about it, and most of all,

which stories do you feel or relate to the most?

So many of them remind me of myself in ways I've never heard anyone say before. I also often feel like there are things I'm missing. I'd be very interested to hear how others feel about it.

I think my favorites overall have been:
Hands
Paper Pills
Godliness
Adventure
The Thinker
The Strength of God
The Teacher

I like Hands, but my over all favorite is Loneliness. I can relate to Enoch Robinson, I have felt the same inability to express my self in any meaning full way, I too am a failed artist. Of coarse the theme that runs through the whole book is the characters can not relate to one another which is why Anderson calls them grotesque's, but something about Robinson's interior world feels familiar to me, he is not only estranged from others, but from himself. His alienation was complete.

Loneliness is a very good, compelling story. In fact, I think it scared me a little. I don't think I can or don't want to accept how much I may be like that...

The story is like a mirror for us to look at parts of our selves we would rather not see. That was Anderson's genius. Do you ever read Anton Chekhov? He is one of my favorite short story writers, he is able to compress an entire life into a few pages.

I would have sworn I had a book of his short stories around here somewhere but I can't find it. I read some of them a long time ago but I think I need to give him a quality reading again. Thanks for pointing it out to me!

I hope you find them. I must reread his stories several times a year. I have a hard time finding books as well, I have got so many they often get misplaced. Sometimes thinking I lost a book I will buy a new edition and then of coarse come across the old one. Consequently I have more then one of the same book. It is time to take stock of my collection.

I have two copies of many books because my mother and I both bought a copy when we were homeschooling. There are also five bookshelves, two of which are a mess, that the Chekov stories could be hiding on. Thought I knew exactly where they were but they must have been moved. If I can't find them, I'll get them from the library. I recently got into visiting the library and my first choice was 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea even though I'm pretty sure there's a copy of it around here somewhere too. Oops! That's okay. It had a cool hardback cover with the Nautilus on it.

I just finished 2,000 Leagues, and Frankenstein last month I wanted to reread a couple of books that I had not read in years. I enjoyed them both. It is amazing how one can still find new meanings in books one has read many times. I find it difficult with books that have been adapted into movies to separate the two, if the I have not read the books in a long time. In some cases the book is almost ruined by the movie, such was the case with Lord of the Rings. The movies where enjoyable, and good adaptions of the book, however I found when I read the book again the images from the movie would interpose themselves on the text so as to change how I envisioned characters and situations the way the author describes them.