I am a bad reader. My room is full of books I haven’t even bothered to open, let alone read. I like reading Thomas Hardy though, it’s fun. I breezed through these 350 or so pages. Every one of the stories is peppered with romance and random happenings, all of them connected by a sense of fate and moral destiny. My favorites are ones like ‘The Distracted Preacher’, ‘Fellow-Townsmen’, ‘The Waiting Supper’, and ‘The Withered Arm’. The scenes in these stories are vivid and well-wrought, almost all could easily work on screen if film executives got hit on the head with a frying pan and decided one day to pursue literary cinema over financial cinema. In my head every short story collection is a potential miniseries anthology. The characters are a little repetitive, but almost always endearing in spite of their many faults. Hardy takes a top-down approach to their lives, never judging but remaining true, and he is always at a great distance. More known for his novels and poetry, his prose style is wordy yet somehow very tidy. He gets the job done, with ease.