Reading short stories

I read Angela Carter, Bloody Chamber last week; now I’m reading AS Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories.  Short stories require a different state of mind from novels.  From time to time, I have to stop reading and ‘recover’ – that’s the most appropriate term I can think of to describe the whatever I need to do.  It’s a combination of stopping to rest and coming up for air but also embraces applauding and standing quite still in astonishment.  Every word counts in a short story.  Sometimes, if something doesn’t quite work, the weight of this demand shows – creakiness is subtle yet also more apparent than in a novel. There are moments when it seems an author has striven too hard and achieved precision at the cost of balance, or voice, or  pace.  But the masters – the Carters and Byatts – rarely do this.  Byatt’s ‘The Stone Woman’ is richly precise, and the language so voluptuous that on, first reading, I worried she’d wobble.  She doesn’t of course.