Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

I don’t usually reach for short story books when choosing my next read but Alice Munro (“master of the short story form”) has gotten good reviews for “Too Much Happiness” and as we’re working on writing them for our anthology it seemed like a good time to give her a try. The stories range from one in which a woman visits her husband in jail while agonizing over the unspeakable crime he has committed, to a young student who visits her roommate’s older lover and ends up at his table dining nude (at his insistence), to a dying widow serving tea (and sympathy) to a murderer who has broken into her home, to a woman, on in age, visiting a childhood friend with whom she drowned a little girl at camp when they were young. There are more stories but these are a few of the memorable ones. I didn’t come out of the end of the book wanting to read more short stories, each of these left me wanting to know more about the characters, more than just a chapter. My fault, not Munro’s, that I enjoy digging deep into a book, enjoying hundreds of pages of thought, character development and plot. Nonetheless she is an excellent writer and if short stories are your thing, this one would be worth the read. (And if anyone wants to borrow this, let me know)