Witty Little Knitter

About once every three years I get some short-story collection, read it and then say to myself 'you should really stop getting those because you don't really like short stories'...only to discover another one that just sounds so cool three years later...and then I tell myself the same thing again. Repeat.

It's just a form I don't enjoy much (and I have tried it many many times...) I mostly feel meh about them and it's the same with three of the five stories I've read so far. I actually really enjoyed one story and sort-of found one not that bad and if I actually liked short-stories I think I would have enjoyed it (does that even make sense?).

Now the one story I really liked: it's the only story that feels really Belfast to me, in the sense that it couldn't have been set somewhere else and I think that's the reason I enjoy it. I prefer my stories to be set somewhere and not in some anonymous place.

So far so good...just that story was the only so far that had a really close connection to the Troubles, two had a sort of vague 'the bad guys are paramilitaries but really they could as well be drug-lords'-thing and two more had no connection at all.

Well and of course the connection to the Troubles/Irish history in general was the main reason that it was hard to imagine this story to be set anywhere else...which does make me feel like a hypocrite now because I have often complained that Belfast/NI tends to be a 'One-Issue crime-novel settings'. People don't kill each other because of love or for money, no it always has to be connected to the troubles (by the way just like East Germans only kill each other because the other once betrayed them to the Stasi and every single crime-novel set in the time of the Weimar Republic features some high-ranking Nazi-party member as bad guy who is then protected by the higher-ups in the police-department because Nazis were already everywhere back then and Have We Mentioned That Nazis Are Really Bad? We Think We Should Tell You In Case You Forgot...yeah slightly off-tangent here, sorry)

Still...I have read crime-novels that were set in places that have not the same kind of difficult history Belfast has (like Oxford, Galway or Coburg) and still I felt the place and could not imagine them being sat anywhere else so shouldn't that be possible for that city as well? But all one of the writers managed was to throw a lot of street-names at the reader but that's also not how this works...it just makes me thing they had a map next to them while writing.

(Apparently I'm really enjoying the not having a character limit on status-update-thing...)