Florida

This analogy is going to take a minute, so bear with me.

I do triathlons. By "do", I mean I slog through a couple sprint triathlons every year. I'm relatively slow, but I love it. And, I especially love the swim because it's something I'm actually pretty freaking good at.

So, before my first tri of the season last weekend, I hopped in the water to warm up. Most swimmers in these races do that, but they maybe just get in to feel the water, test their goggles, etc. I get in and I swim HARD. That's because I've figured out over the years that it takes me a good 100 meters or so to really feel like my shoulders are warmed up.

What does this have to do with anything? I'm getting there.

That relatively long warm up (especially for a swim that's only half a mile) is analogous to why I've never been a fan of short stories. When I read - like when I swim - it takes me awhile to get warmed up. With short stories, I feel like I'm just getting warmed up and it's already over.

Still, I picked up Florida at the library. I had read too many good things about Lauren Groff and this particular collection. It tempted me despite all my past feelings about short stories.

Florida is a collection of stories set in the state that's a million short stories waiting to happen. I don't mean that in a "Florida man" kind of way, with face eating and other weird stories that are enough to populate an entire Twitter account. But, between the weather and the swamps and the creatures, Florida really is rich with potential fiction.

These stories include everything from two little girls trapped alone on an island to a woman waiting out a hurricane in her old house, all alone. They're incredibly rich and incredibly written. How Groff packs so much into 20 pages or so is well beyond me. Each story was interesting enough to stand on its own and each one contained so much detail, the characters and the settings truly came alive.

Still (and back to that analogy that started this rambling), I never really felt like my shoulders warmed up.

I just don't think short stories are for me. I will say, though, that Groff's writing was so fantastic, I'll be looking into her longer fiction. I can absolutely see why this collection received the accolades it did.