Good Bones

Some days, you simply don't have the attention span required of you for reading good books. Sometimes, I find even short stories too taxing and poetry much too dense to absorb properly. That's when Good Bones will come in handy, for it will provide doses of short, potent prose.It's a tiny little book, with tiny short stories (three or four pages on average) that are clever, intriguing and shot through with Margaret Atwood's luscious style. Despite the lengths of the stories, they are in no way lacking in emotion or intensity. They are snippets of random musings, of well-known stories told from somebody else's point of view, of sci-fi fantasies that reflect upon our own humanity...The stories do not link to each other. As far as I can see, they are writing experiments, little flashes of inspiration that do not fit somewhere in a greater whole (such as a novel). They are ideas, brief contemplation of how the world is, snapshots of human behaviour. Atwood has a particularly cutting insight into the way things are. I cried at certain stories, not because they were formulated with particular tragic scenes, but because they moved me. Forlorn beauty, half-remembered sensations, the things she could say with a stroke of a pen are those dark, shadowy feelings we sometimes find in ourselves, yet could never describe. Now she has done it for us, and it makes for cathartic reading.Through Good Bones we are given a glimpse of Atwood's world: usually bleak, sometimes spine-chilling with its prediction of how the world just might turn out, but always haunting and always beautiful. If you have not read any of her works before, this is a great place to start. If you have read and enjoyed her other works, this one will definitely be worth your while.