Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt

I find Byatt a very strange author, because her writing is very hit-and-miss (for me at least) and because I enjoy her writing much more in retrospect than I do when actually reading it. Several of these stories bothered me because of how contrived the writing was, it felt so self-conscious and like she was just trying too hard, using short, jerky sentences and words that seem like she just spent some time scouring the thesaurus for them (I'm afraid that at her worst, her writing reads like a fanfic). However, there are moments that are very striking, Byatt seems to have a particular knack with frozen images, several times while reading I could just picture what she was writing about perfectly, down to the last detail. I'd say that two of these stories, 'Raw Material' and 'The Pink Ribbon', are actually very good, while the other three are highly missable. I think my biggest complaint about Byatt, especially in this collection, is that she lacks a sense of humour, or enough of one. These stories are just too sincere, too unbroken by any levity or ability to see the funny side of things. I liked The Biographer's Tale because it had some elements of humour, as did Possession, but even in those works, I feel like Byatt doesn't exploit the full potential of the humorous element in her stories. There's a delightfully absurd bit in Possession when the American collector and the British scholars are racing each other to find some lost manuscripts that I remember could have been so much funnier. She just takes herself too seriously. Humour is one of my favourite things about postmodernism and metafiction, and without it, I feel like a lot of the charm is lost.