#853 The Love Machine- Julia Elliott

#853 The Love Machine- Julia Elliott

The story is told by a robot inside a college laboratory. It is a project on Artificial Intelligence and we see the process from inside the head of the one being experimented on, or built, or evolving depending on how you look at it. It has been programmed to “feel” love, or something closer to infatuation. First, it “loved” a lab assistant but when that got violent, it was reprogramed to “love” a toy dog.  

As it is being taught more about the world and the human condition, its ability to grasp what love is, and its reaction to it gets more intricate. Like humans, at first the feelings are basic, and their manners mimic those it learns from others. Later it gets more individual, and instead of seeing the programming, it feels more like self-determination. But as it gets more complicated, it boils down one basic idea:

“Nevertheless, I wanted to fuse with her in some meaningful way.”

Love among robots seems pointless, and teaching a robot to learn to love like a human does seems cruelly unfair, since the anatomy isn’t there to ever completely sate those “desires.” But, it begs the question: Isn’t human love itself pointless and unfair even to humans?

Notable Passage: “What are the relationships among love, knowledge, language, and consciousness?”

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#701 East of the West- Miroslav Penkov

#701 East of the West- Miroslav Penkov

A village is bisected by a river. In one of the cruelties of geopolitics it is separated by war. One side is now Bulgarian and the other Serbian. They are allowed only one crossing every five years. Families are torn apart and histories are lost. In the middle of the river is a drowned church, aptly representing lost hope and faith.

Love still grows however, and Nose falls in love with his cousin Vera on the other side. It is a lifelong yearning that can never be fully realized, and ends in unbelievable heartbreak. The kind of heartbreak that occurs when holding onto the last sliver of hope can create. 

“You’re holding life by the throat. So get your shit together and learn how to choke the bastard, because the bastard already knows how to choke you.”

Out of darkness and sorrow comes beautiful art. This is a beautifully rendered story about a very dark and sad existence. What do you cling to when hope is lost, when light is gone and when faith is literally washed away? I guess the answer is: anything you can. 

Notable Passage: “The words piled on my heart like stones and I thought how much I wanted to be like the river, which had no memory, and how little like the earth, which could never forget.”

Rating: 9-9-10-10 Total= 38

#690 The Lark- Amelia Gray

#690 The Lark- Amelia Gray

Another day another story with a sickening plot element, this time literally. William has a puking problem. He vomits every time he speaks. After the words come out, so does the bile in direct proportion to the length of his sentences. As you can imagine, this makes William very quiet and very lonely.

He naturally gets a job working at a post office, where his speaking can be brief and his customers either odd themselves or at least wanting to spend very little time in the post office. He manages to find some sort of equilibrium and can hide his affliction. That is until one day a woman seemingly crazy comes in toting a legless can in a carrier and he spews all over the office and ruins some first class mail. The proverbial cat is out of the bag and his co-workers are sickened. Everyone is sickened except the crazy cat lady. They say there is a soul mate for everyone.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#649 In the Winter Sky- Jon McGregor

#649 In the Winter Sky- Jon McGregor 

There is a lot of love in this story, love of family, love of the land. It’s authentic and earthy. It is also tragic like love often is, but this not a love story. This is a story about truth and life, living with your mistakes; it is about inevitability.

George kissed a girl for the first time when he was seventeen, the same night that he killed a drunken stranger with his car. The kiss led to his marriage and the killing led to a secret he would keep for many years. Both were defining moments, both were inevitable and both represent the land and the earth. 

Things happen differently in the farmland. You marry the girl nest door, you work your family’s land when your father gets too old, you live with your mistakes the best you can. Macgregor writes this atmosphere so well; The slowness of a farm, the stillness of time and the deep meaning in small gestures.

“She has seen the faint smiles and nods which indicate that he is well pleased. She hopes that George has noticed; She suspects that he has not.”

The pastoral setting somehow smoothes over the tragedy as a mere fact of life. The whole story is interwoven with the poetry of Joanne. It’s from her notebooks and either unfinished, unpolished or re-written so we see the changes. Like the story itself the poetry is both delicate and deeply rooted, and at times stunningly emotional.

There is no history here.

No dramatic finds of Saxon villages.

No burial mounds of hidden treasures.

Only the rusted anchors our ploughs drag up,

Left when these fields were the sea.

Notable Passage: “The death he had made in the hole he had made in the earth.”

Rating: 9-9-10-9 Total= 37

#634 In The Moment- Amelia Gray

#634 In The Moment- Amelia Gray

“Gutshot” is a collection of short stories by Amelia Gray that comes to me highly touted. This is the opening story. Mark and Emily are in love. It is true and intense. They attempt to live inside this love, and cut ties to the past and the future. To be truly non-attached has a certain religious appeal, but in the real world it can all be a bit messy.

They go from madly in love to strictly nihilistic. They rid themselves of possessions, cut off outside influence (like light) lose their jobs, and forget their families. Taken to the logical-illogical extreme, cutting yourself from past and future would mean losing all those memories like who you are and what things do. 

“Emily taught him to view each day as a wild element divorced from past and future. He needed not to exist as a point on a vector but ultimately to destroy the vector and inhabit that solitary point, like living inside a meteor without fear or knowledge of its movement.”

This is a fun mind experiment on taking an ethos a bit too far. Camus would be proud.

Rating: 8-9-8-8 Total= 33

#544 Attack of the Love Dogma- Toure

#544 Attack of the Love Dogma- Toure

Mojo is on a date with a beautiful blonde woman. They are having a wonderful time, and they are both feeling like this could be something real.

“He was the smartest guy she’d ever met. She was more at peace than anyone he’d ever known. He loved her lips. She loved his hands. It was too early for promises, but promise was in the air.”

They wanted to continue their date, but Mojo was worried.

“Black and Blonde together in Soul City? He knew better. He knew as every boy who grows up in Soul City knows, that if you were in Soul City with a blonde after dark, the Love Dogma would get ya.”

And that’s exactly what happened when they parked for some ice cream. Mojo got yanked out of his car by a snatch squad and was taken directly to Dr. Ziggaboo at the Love Dogma’s Reassignment Center. Here they took black men that had a blonde obsession and reminded them about black beauty. Like something out of 1984 this Orwellian re-education program that was creepy and over the top. Mojo got out just in time. All he wanted was a chance to see if this woman was the real deal.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

#486 Cranberry Relish- Katherine Heiny

Josie, a married woman with two kids and a nice happy life has been sleeping with a man she met on facebook. Now this man is breaking up with her for a woman he met on twitter. The irony of all this isn’t lost on Josie of course who has felt strange about the whole order of things anyway:

“We’re doing all this backwards…their minds had fallen in love before their bodies did and what if their bodies got all stubborn and wouldn’t fall in line?”

If Heiny wasn’t an exceptional storyteller, this is where I’d be saying how saturated I’ve become with tales of infidelity, or I’d say how un-clever the love-in-the-age-of-social-media story line is. If I did say all those things, I’d have a lot of evidence to back my statement up. However, even when I don’t get blown away by her story subjects, I still really enjoy reading Heiny’s stories. Perhaps it’s the matter-of-fact nonjudgmental take on morality issues, or that even when there seems to be little emotion in the characters it’s less about being cold and more about not wallowing in other people’s feelings.

This may be my least favorite in this collection so far, but I’ll still take it over the majority of other stories with similar topics.

Rating: 8-7-7-7 Total= 29

#463 Hearts & Crosses- O. Henry

#463 Hearts & Crosses- O. Henry

Intrigue on a western ranch. Webb Yeager was the foreman of McAllister’s ranch. He was a stern and respected cow-punch and his men liked him. McCallister liked how his foreman ran the ranch, but didn’t like that his daughter and him were getting too close. But love will endure, the two developed a secret code to talk with each.

I found this story a little out of O.Henry’s wheelhouse. You expect a little dating in language and tone, but even for O.Henry’s time the attempts at lingo and dialect fall a little flat. This is not O.Henry’s New York City. It’s inauthentic and as story telling goes, not of the caliber of O.Henry’s best.

Rating: 6-6-5-5 Total= 22

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

#396 Single, Carefree, Mellow- Katherine Heiny

This story is about loss, dependence, love, worth. Maya knows that her dog is dying, and she also knows that her relationship should probably end soon, maybe. It’s a battle in her mind between the unconditional love of a dog and the complicated love between humans.

This is a no fault story, there is no antagonist, just the thoughts of Maya. We root for her to find that something that will settle het mind down. We don’t know, as readers either whether she should break up with her boyfriend. They seem somewhat happy, he is good to her, his family loves her. It’s a struggle we all deal with, is there such a thing as unconditional love?

One thing I found really interesting was this litmus test idea below, it’ll stick with me. I’m not sure if I know what my defining story is.

“Maya had a theory that everyone had a story that somehow defined them, both the good and the bad, and that these stories should be shared early on in relationships. If the other person appreciated the story, that meant you should proceed with the relationship, and if the other person failed to understand the depth of the story, or were judgmental, then there was basically no point in further contact.”

#375 How to Give the Wrong Impression- Katherine Heiny

#375 How to Give the Wrong Impression- Katherine Heiny

If a modern phenomenon can be considered an age-old tale, then this is it: urban apartment living with unrequited love. This goes beyond the “friend zone,” this is “friend purgatory.”

Gwen and Boris live together, but not in that way. They are apartment mates. To the outside world they look like much more, and in their own minds they each secretly wish to be. They don’t deny rumors or insinuations that they are in a relationship, but they won’t outright imply it either. To each other, they try their hardest to hide their feelings to the point that:

“you worry you’re becoming a pathological liar.”

They get jealous of each other’s romantic lives, but even that gets more scarce with time. “You don’t have boyfriends anymore, and these days you don’t even have dates.” It’s a game of relationship chicken; how many hints can you drop and hope that the other finally makes the first move?

Rating: 8-7-9-9 Total= 33

#374 Romance- Chuck Palahniuk

#374 Romance- Chuck Palahniuk

It gets to the point where you see a Palahniuk story with a title like Romance, and you spend the whole time waiting for the dark, twisted, creepy “reveal.” Maybe because I was clenched for it, I didn’t find the twist that creepy. In a way, this is a touching love story about a man finding true happiness.

Love and happiness are both individual pursuits. Not everyone likes what you like, and if you can find someone who’s faults you can not only live with, but adore…maybe that’s true love.

Notable Passage: “Everybody looks a little crazy if you’re looking close enough, and if you can’t look that close then you don’t really love them.”

Rating: 8-8-8-7 Total= 31

#353 Lauren Groff- L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story

#353 L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story- Lauren Groff

You could call this amazing story: Love in the Time of Spanish Influenza. Like the great love tragedies of Gabriel Garcia Marques, this one leaves you heavy with grief, and envious of the love lost.

Lodovico Debard is a famous man. “He’s a swimmer, but he is other things, too: a forty-three-year-old with a mighty set of pectorals, one chipped front tooth, and a rakish smile; a rumored Bolshevik; a poet, filler of notebooks, absinthe drinker, cavorter of the literary types.”

He begins giving swim lessens to Aliette Huber. She was a beautiful and accomplished young woman before being stricken by polio. Now in a wheelchair, this protected heiress hopes to gain strength, and other things, from her new savior.

“She knows L. from his book of poetry, which she reads when she was recuperating from her illness. She feels he knows him so intimately that now, freezing on the dock, she is startled and near tears: she has just realized that, to him, she is a stranger.”

Their love affair is careful but passionate. As their fate runs its course, so does the global epidemic of Spanish Flu, swallowing the world in death and fear. They hardly notice:

“Who in the midst of passion, is vigilant against illness? Who listens to the reports of recent decimated populations in Spain, India, Bora Bora, when new lips, tongues, and poems fill the world?”

Notable Passage: “Their kiss is long and hungry. If they knew how often they would remember it, for how many years it would be their dearest memory, this kiss would last for hours.”

Rating: 10-10-10-10 Total= 40