An End to Wreckage of Reason

This week I will touch on the short stories in Wreckage of Reason. The first one is called Cottage Life. I loved the first line of this, “I cracked time the same way I cracked you.” I just thought it was a beautifully written opening line that really grabs the readers’ attention. Overall, the story kind of lost me, but the insecurity the narrator suggests was something I could relate to easily. The Women by Shope was my next story. I will start off by saying that this is not one that I enjoyed. Again it stems back to my comments about poetry, I don’t like “disorderly” writing so it greatly bothers me that many of her sentences do not begin with a capital letter. I have difficulty getting past visual styles like these and it become very difficult to like the story at all because I end up being so annoyed.

You A love (crossed out) War story was adorable just for the title. The title itself sort of foreshadows a change of heart by the end of the story. Despite the (at times) strange setup, I liked this story. I was able to get into it because the beginning was set up like a “normal” short story. I was even able to relate to the narrator with the lines, “You fell asleep right away. You’re prone to it. I stayed up reading my disappointing novel until my eyelids dropped. Then I turned off the bedside lamp and went to sleep.” That pretty much described myself (the reader) and my boyfriend (the one who can be asleep in 30 seconds). In this one, I also really liked page 268 section 9 where it had in parenthesis a descriptor to indicate how something was said. I just thought it was neat.

Black Wings was interesting. I’m not sure if I missed the point or not but I liked it nonetheless. I thought it was interesting watching their relationship, seeing inside one of their heads. My main question regarding this is about the asexuality. It didn’t really make sense to me why in the beginning it said, “I want to know what it is like to be asexual…I have met someone and asked him if we can just read books together. To my surprise he has agreed.” So did she want a plutonic relationship or what? To me that was basically just asking for him to be her friend. I also didn’t get the random comments about having seen the woman drop her child and having done nothing. All in all, I focused on the pair’s relationship to one another, which seemed to be not that close, mostly like any friendship. So I liked it, but I ended with the feeling of “I missed something”.