The Sunday Salon: Short Stories

I finished my forth collection of short stories this year, thats not many for some people, but until this year I had only really read short stories for school and university, they somehow passed me by.

This morning I finished a collection which I found in school - 30 copies mainly unused that I tripped over while looking for something completely different, typical of our overly stocked and underused collection - Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century. Some of these stories I had read previously - The Red Room, The Ostler, The Pit and the Pendulum but I also managed to discover some which were new to me and a few authors I plan on researching to find out what other material they have written - namely Ambrose Bierce and Guy de Maupassant. And this also ticks of one genre in The Genre Challenge

I'm not sure if it is just the collections whic I have read this year:

Skin, Roald Dahl
The Little Black Book of Stories, Byatt
Fragile Things, Gaiman
Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Robert Etty

(I also participated in Short Story September)

but short stories seem to largely feature twists and turns, and generally do it better than novels.

I'm not sure why I haven't picked up many collections of short stories over the years, maybe because they tend to be mingled in amongst the fiction in libraries and bookshops and I just miss them, and maybe because you rarely hear them recommended.

Do you read short stories? if not, what puts you off?

The rest of my day is largely going to be spent planning and marking, and hopefully devoting a few hours to The Known World.