The History of Sound by David Shattuck

Saturday, Aug. 17, 2024--San Antonio

The History of Sound by David Shattuck is a collection of short stories set in New England.  Reading them gave me my most pleasurable reading experience of this year.  I found myself "inside the stories"--experiencing them vicariously because they were so well written and so interesting.  The title story is a very beautiful one which is presently being made into a film starring Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor.  And there are connections between various stories--little nuggets of information that can tie a stand-alone story to a previous one even though there may be years or centuries between them.  The stories range time settings from the late 1600s to the present and there are a variety of subjects--researching and recording folk music in the back wooded areas of Maine, living on Nantucket island when it was isolated with few people and horrible winters, belonging to a religious cult led to believe that that the righteous would climb a beam of light to heaven at the change of the century from the 1600s to 1700, etc.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5 and the title story 5 stars out of 5.