Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing: Stories by Lydia Peelle

Hi, guys, sorry for my absence of late, I'm just...really lazy. Well, I've also been focusing on writing a lot lately, and I've actually sent a short story as well as a poem to literary magazines in attempts for publication. So fingers crossed at that happening. (As always, you can find my writing through either Figment or Goodreads...ask if you want to and I'll give you a link.) Aside from that, I've been finding myself more and more surrounded by people who care about books, so I can actually talk about books to real people now, which is awesome.


Now, down to business...


From Goodreads: Peelle has crafted eight stories that capture these moments: summers riding horses, life as a carnival worker, kidding season on a farm. Quiet and telling, her stories are filled alternately with supreme joy and with deep sorrow, desperation and longing, dreams born and broken -- set in landscapes where the clock ticks more slowly. Her landscapes are the kind of places you want to run away from, or to which you wish you could return, if time hadn't irrevocably changed them. A single thread runs through each of these stories, the unspoken quest to answer one of life's most primal questions: Who am I?


My review: 4.5/5
Very good collection of short stories. Lydia Peelle was an impressive writer, and I'm happy to have noticed this one out in perfect among the tornado of used books that is my local bookstore. The stories were realistic, fun, and had a great common theme among them - a feeling of something that is lost, or something that once was. My god, some of these stories were just beautiful.
The only thing that slowed the book for me is that it isn't exactly fun to read. That's usually what writing that's true to real emotion is like, though, because it is not escapism, so it's not something that I fault the book for.
For the record, my favorite story was the title story, 'Reasons For and Advantages of Breathing.'
I will definitely be giving some of these stories rereads.

Thanks for reading, and for, like, still existing even when I'm too busy to get on my blog for months at a time.