Reading is my oldest and most faithful friend. I have always loved finding somewhere calm and quiet, where I can just sit down, shut up, and read. That being said, through my four years of High School I could not find a way to enjoy my lit classes. Everyday I would sit down for my daily staring contest with the wall clock, and, inevitably, lose. Something about being told what to read immediately turned me off. After graduation, though, I revisited the genre that I affectionately call "Lit Class Fiction," and found that reading what I want, when I wanted, drastically changed how I felt about a number of those books and stories (I'm looking at you, Gatsby).The following short stories are some of my favorites in the "Lit Class Fiction" genre:
1. "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" by Haruki Murakami
http://www.gq.com/story/haruki-murakami-super-frog...
Imagine you're sitting alone at home and you hear a knock on your front door. Without thinking, you open it up. What's the strangest thing you could find standing on your doorstep? If you said three beavers who were pretending to be a person wearing a trench coat, and trying to sell you magazine subscriptions, unfortunately you would not be correct. A six foot tall talking frog who insists he needs your help to save the city of Tokyo would take that prize.
This is exactly what happens to Katigiri, our protagonist in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," who insists to Super-Frog, that he is far too ordinary to save Tokyo. "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo" is both an entertaining and magical story, as well as a beautiful philosophy on intrinsic human value; each person matters and each person is relevant, simply because they exist.
2. "The Snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/heming.html
It's entirely possible that you did read this story in High School, but I didn't. So it can make the list. I hadn't read this story until a few months ago, and it immediately became one of my favorite short stories. The story follows Harry and his wife, Helen, while they're hunting big game in Africa. Harry has developed gangrene after scratching his leg on a thorn and neglecting to apply iodine to the wound. Harry believes from the outset of the story that he is going to die, and ruminates on all the things he would've done differently if he'd had more time.
This story puts into words the feeling we all have - that we have the rest of time to accomplish our dreams - and the realization that everyone needs experience eventually - that life is fragile and our time is preciously finite. If anything, reading this story will make you finally log out of Netflix and go create something (after one more episode).
3. "Where We Must Be" by Laura Van den Berg
http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/10303732...
Have you ever wondered what it's like to be Bigfoot, hunting unsuspecting victims? The first story in van den Berg's acclaimed short story collection, "What the world will look like when all the water leaves us" answers this question, as the narrator, Jean, is an actress who routinely hunts and is hunted by paying customers, as Bigfoot. At home, Jean is involved with (and in love with?) her terminally ill neighbor, Jimmy. If Hemingway's story brought you down, this story will be able to bring you back up. It's a brilliant juxtaposition between the silliness of Bigfoot impersonators and the utter depression of star crossed lovers. Van den Berg takes these themes - love, death, sacrifice, and the existential side of pretending to be Bigfoot - and creates a tragically fun (fungic?) story.
4. "The Mosquito Story" by Lily Hoang
https://books.google.com/books?id=JktSxVsXDZYC&pg=...
Ngoc, in simple terms, is the most beautiful girl in the world. She lives in a small village, but dreams of the splendors of living the rich life, in a rich city, with a rich husband. When her parents marry her off to Hien, a man who works at the University in Saigon, she is disappointed in the simple life he prefers, and Ngoc continues to fantasize about a life of splendor. Hen loves her unconditionally, while the focal point of Ngoc's life continues to be extravagance. In just five and a half pages, Hoang retells an old, nearly lost, Vietnamese fairy tale that illustrates the dangers of enabling toxic people. She shows how perilous loving someone so freely can be, if you don't think about your own basic needs. Hoang wrote this story as a recreation of a story she read as a child - she searched for years to find the old collection of Vietnamese fairy tales her parents gave her as a child, but found no success. You'll read this story, turn back to the first page, and read it over again. Guaranteed.
*Disclaimer
If you have read any of these books in High School, great! Sorry I didn't find a wholly unique list, though. If you haven't read these since your lit courses, I highly recommend you check them out again. Each of them holds up to rereading - every story worth reading does, after all.
