I visit my local Ollie’s Bargain Outlet a few times a month. On my last visit I found this book on The Spirit of America and a book on attention span problems in our digital age At first I thought about writing a patriotic-themed blog post, since this is America’s 250th Anniversary. Every direction we turn browsing media and social media, bad news dominates, following that old adage, “If it bleeds, it leads and America does need some positive American spirit.
This Spirit of America find was published in 2016, but these 101 stories are all new to me. For decades I scoffed at these “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books, thinking they’re just sentimental slop, but a couple years ago, I purchased one with 101 stories on Forgiveness (at Ollie’s, of course). I started reading these stories, a few at a time, and it started making me think differently about forgiveness. And thinking differently was what I needed to do, instead of keep hoping if I just started to “feel” differently, I’d really forgive some serious wrongs. I knew I needed to work harder on my commitment to forgiving and as silly as this might sound, these 101 forgiveness stories helped me find my way. Forgiveness really is a decision we have to make, not some feeling we’re hoping we’ll find. Once you make the decision to forgive and recommit to it continuously, your feelings will begin to take direction from your commitment.
The Chicken Soup for the Soul website defines their goal as to nourish your soul and change the world one story at a time. Ordinary people submit these stories and then the editors select which ones to include.
Then I thought this book about our decreasing attention spans, due to digital use, is very important too and might be a better blog post topic. There’s mountains of reputable research on our decreasing attention span. I noticed this problem with how I used to be able to read for hours and concentrate and now I have to fight the urge to check my cell phone or go sit in front of my PC and scroll. To be honest, 99.9% of my scrolling is not productive. I’ve been trying to go back to the old me, who could stay focused and read through piles of books effortlessly. Along with my attention span decline, I also noticed that I struggle with making a choice when I’m dealing with too many choices. This is most obvious when it comes to deciding what to watch on TV, now that streaming services overwhelm me. Often I scroll for 10 minutes or so, then I turn off the TV and don’t watch anything.
Naturally, when I got home I did some googling about the author of this attention span book. The author appears to have real expertise on this topic and has spent decades as a research scientist on how people use and interact with digital technologies.
I watched this video of Dr. Mark being interviewed about her work and book on attention span:
Combining the two Ollie’s book purchases, the rest of this blog post is my combining America’s spirit and attention span issues. One of my strategies to improve my attention span has been to start reading more short stories again. I’ll offer up a history book that reads like a collection of great short stories and then some great American short stories for you to consider.
My love of short stories started when I was a kid. I kept several of my childhood Scholastic Book Club purchases and some of my favorites were short story collections, like this one, Princess Tales:
I have a complete collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works and if you like horror, his work is available free online. I don’t like horror or scary stuff, but go figure, here’s another childhood book of short stories, Nine Witch Tales (copyright 1968). I snapped a photo of it next to a 1970s purchase, 50 Great Ghost Stories I read both of these collections of short stories:
In 2018 a frequent commenter on my blog recommended David McCullough’s, Brave Companions: Portraits in History, which painted portraits of some well-known Americans, but others are largely forgotten. I’ve returned to this McCullough book over and over, along with buying several books based on the “portraits” in this book. Each chapter is like a separate exciting short story and that’s probably why I love this book so much. In one chapter he mentioned American aviators and that’s not a topic that thrills me, although I did read a biography about American aviator, Amelia Earhart, as a kid. He mentioned many of the early aviators were also gifted writers, so there I was buying early female aviator, Beryl Markham’s book, West with the Night, and read an historical novel, Circling the Sun, about Markham’s life. Markham grew up in Kenya and was friends with the Danish writer, Karen Blixen, who wrote the novel, Out of Africa, which became a big movie starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep.
Moving to American aviators, McCullough mentioned that both Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were gifted writers, so I recently purchased two books, Bring Me A Unicorn and North To the Orient, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who often served as Lindbergh’s navigator on flights. The Lindberghs’ politics were controversial and their private lives messy, but they were definitely important figures as America took to the skies.
This same McCullough book led me to the American author, Conrad Richter, whose name didn’t even ring a bell. Richter used early America as the setting for many of his works, when the American frontier was the original American colonies. Several of his novels centered on the conflicts between colonists and Native Americans, often with his characters expressing the situation from their point of view, which ditches the politics and makes these very human stories. He also penned some Old West novels and one of the best American short story collections I’ve ever read, The Rawhide Knot and Other Stories. Richter used a “rawhide knot” to symbolize pioneer marriages bound together by the harshness of survival and threat of sudden danger in an untamed land, not fanciful courtship or romance. These stories aren’t sappy romances, but they are brimming with the American spirit. If you loved the novel, Lonesome Dove, you will love Richter’s stories.
My all-time favorite American short story writer is O Henry, which most people will recognize his classic, The Gift of the Magi. His short stories often had clever plot twists at the end and are very humorous. He often wrote about people down on their luck and two of my favorites are about young women trying to survive in a harsh city, with only a typewriter in hand, Springtime a la Carte and The Skylight Room.
Louisa May Alcott’s most famous work, is probably, Little Women, which also has several movie adaptations. I like the 1994 version with Winona Ryder playing Jo March. There’s a lesser known Alcott short story, Hospital Sketches, which was based on Alcott’s Civil War experience as a nurse in a Georgetown hospital caring for wounded soldiers from the Battle of Fredericksburg. Despite the many horrific scenes, Alcott added many witty and funny bits, that balance it out. She created a feisty fictional main character, Tribulation Periwinkle. “Tribulation” sounds like such a perfect 1800s New England character name, where they often chose children’s names linked to the Bible and morality. Tribulation was fiercely independent, but also vulnerable, totally unprepared for seeing the ravages of war in severely wounded and dying soldiers pouring into the makeshift Union Army hospital and even more unprepared for the grueling nursing duties. Most war stories are written by men and about men, so Hospital Sketches offers a female perspective on the realities of war.
If you like man against nature survival stories, Jack London, was a master of that genre. He wrote several famous novels, like The Call of the Wild and White Fang, but he was also wrote many great short stories, which are available online: https://americanliterature.com/author/jack-london.
Back in 2016 I wrote a blog post about Susan Glaspell’s short story, A Jury of Her Peers, which is often hailed as early feminist literature, but this story is a great murder/detective story. The writer based it on a real murder story she covered as a news reporter, where a rural farm wife murdered her husband. Sometimes a dead canary can sing louder than a live one. Definitely read this story.
I’ll end here, but truly if you want to celebrate America’s spirit, you can’t go wrong diving into some great American short stories and many are available free online.
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