I’m voraciously reading my way through Kerry Clare’s Canada Reads Indies. Carrie Snyder’s Hair Hat also qualifies for Kate Sutherland’s Short Story Reading Challenge; I’m trying to read at least five new collections this year.

The short story is my favourite form, and I seem to hold them to a higher standard than I do novels. When I read new stories, I tend to hold them up to those of my favourite author, Alice Munro, and how can you compete with her? I’ve been blown away recently by collections of stories about unusual characters and/or extreme situations; for example, Michel Faber’s The Fahrenheit Twins (my review here)  and Neil Smith’s Bang Crunch. But when it comes to Alice Munro-esque stories about ordinary people, I’m hard to impress. Hair Hat impresses. These are stories about everyday people and situations told with subtlety and acuity, and Snyder successfully writes in a diverse range of voices: an eight-year-old girl staying with her aunt while her mother gives birth; the girl’s aunt, a cancer survivor; a graduate student contemplating commitment; a young woman about to break the news of her father’s death to her institutionalized mother; a meddlesome landlady; a nervous grandmother; an apprehensive mother meeting her birth grandfather for the first time. The characters are connected by their encounters with an enigmatic man whose hair is shaped like a hat, and we learn just bits and pieces about him until the final story, my favourite of the lot.

Kerry has written a wonderful review of Hair Hat here.  I agree with her, that it’s worth reading twice, and I don’t say that about a lot of books.  However, I did not love it enough to usurp Wild Geese.

Here are my current rankings:

1. Wild Geese
2. Hair Hat
3. How Happy to Be