Monday, April 25, 2016

A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories by Flannery O'Connor

I finally finished my 2nd classic in this year's Back to the Classics Challenge. This met the category of "a volume of classic short stories".

This book was painful to get through. It is a very accurate picture of deep southern life in the early 1900s, which can be very challenging to read. But it wasn't really that that I didn't enjoy. The style was hard to read and several of the stories felt way too incomplete. I realize short stories are made to tell a story in a brief amount of time, but I felt like a few didn't even tell a story. I would get to the end and think, "That's it?" A couple of the plot lines were outright depressing, which again doesn't usually bother me, but these left me feeling dark in not a good way.

As a whole I would not recommend this book, but I know others really enjoy her work, so take it as you will. It would be good for a history/culture study in late high school or college, maybe, or good for an English class on how to not write a short story, but beyond that I cannot say it has much value.

I would give this book 2 stars.

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