Every Little Thing by Celeste Ng
My rating: 5/5 cats
WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!
this explanation/intro will be posted before each day’s short story. scroll down to get to the story-review.
this is the FOURTH year of me doing a short story advent calendar as my december project. for those of you new to me or this endeavor, here’s the skinny: every day in december, i will be reading a short story that is 1) available free somewhere on internet, and 2) listed on goodreads as its own discrete entity. there will be links provided for those of you who like to read (or listen to) short stories for free, and also for those of you who have wildly overestimated how many books you can read in a year and are freaking out about not meeting your 2019 reading-challenge goals. i have been gathering links all year when tasty little tales have popped into my feed, but i will also accept additional suggestions, as long as they meet my aforementioned 1), 2) standards.
if you scroll to the end of the reviews linked here, you will find links to all the previous years’ stories, which means NINETY-THREE FREEBIES FOR YOU!
2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2018: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
reviews of these will vary in length/quality depending on my available time/brain power.
so, let’s begin
DECEMBER 31
After all these years, I can tell at a glance who’s staying in each room: which rooms are women and which are men; who’s traveling with a wife, and who’s just there for the special. The married women make messes: wine bottles on the floor, lipstick on the glasses, mascara stains on the pillowcases. They don’t have to clean it up, so they take the chance to be as messy as they can, like they wish they could be in their own homes. The unmarried ones, the ones just there to meet their men, are the neatest, as if they don’t want to leave any clue about who they are. They leave nothing but their hairs in the sink.
closing out this short story advent calendar on a high note, with YES another story by celeste ng, but it’s such an absolutely perfect story, i’m not even apologizing for the author-rerun.
i love her writing, i love the emotional spheres she’s able to develop in such a short space; deftly layering delicate backstories to build dense psychological aspects around her characters—it is absolutely masterful, and this story is a particularly rich and meaty treasure.
if anyone knows anywhere else she has published short stories, please let me know. i need more like this, and i won’t wait for next december to read them, either.
read it for yourself here:
https://web.archive.org/web/201801232…
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read my book reviews on goodreads
Anna Allike
January 5, 2020 at 1:24 pm
Very happy about the author-rerun 🙂 Your two decemberchoices are the first stories I’ve read of Ng, and I liked both of them a lot (now her novels are added to my library-wishlist).
There’s a link to one of her earlier short stories (B & B) at the bottom of this page: https://www.celesteng.com/essays-and-stories (I haven’t read it – yet).
karen t. brissette
January 7, 2020 at 9:49 pm
ooh, wonderful, thank you! i can’t use it for my advent calendar, because it’s not on goodreads – boooooo, but i can read it just for funsies and i am very grateful for the link! happy reading to us both!