The Five Thousand and One Nights by Penelope Lively is a book of short stories I read today on BART and the 38R Geary bus. Reading on that bus is serious business because the street from Union Square to Van Ness is cratered and the bus shakes as if it's going to fall apart. Lively is really good with a character in a situation and a place: a control freak woman and her husband stop to pick up a hitchhiker in the rain and it all goes horribly wrong; the mom from hell writes a Christmas letter and reveals all the awful ways she torments and humiliates her entire family; old loves get reacquainted at a wedding; a slimy creep hits on his ex-wife and she puts him in his place; a woman works the night shift and takes care of her family during the day, and a last minute school project blows her careful juggling act all to hell; after five thousand nights, Scheherazade and the Sultan have a fiction telling contest where she's telling plots of British women's writers and he's narrating action adventure stories and each of them is bored by the other. She's very efficient and often quite funny. I think I'd like to read her memoirs.
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