The best short stories for when spare time is short

During a lengthy hospital stay once, I needed to escape. Magazines were formulaic and newspapers dark. This book materialized on a library trolley. A plain dark blue hard cover looking dull and aged amongst the same-old paperbacks. After only the first story of this magical collection I was hooked away from all around me and into Wells’ tales of incredible imagination. Wells’ other shorts have become well known to the masses but here contained over forty lesser-known proto-sci-fi gems. In the way that Dickens did with characters that others could not, Wells was not constrained by conventions of science. The thought-provoking The Door in the Wall and The Red Room remain today are examples of skill for all contemporaries to aspire to.

This was recommended to me as having been the lyrical inspiration to songs by several musical artists I was listening to in my teens. To this day I am still baffled and impressed as to where on Earth Dick ever found the ideas for some of these stories. Almost experimental in their nature, particularly at the time of writing, and breaking ground as he went along, P. K. Dick’s skill of crafting chilling perspective scenarios again and again have, become popular film plots. In this book and his other short story collections, you can feast on many more deeply original plots, any number of which could be made into Hollywood films. Many years ahead of his time and almost predicting the disposable instantaneous world we would live in, Dick’s short stories almost arrived from the future themselves. I think he had the edge on dialogue too. I don’t own a TV and like Wells, Dick’s stories work particularly well when adapted for radio. Stories such as "Meddler" and "Roog" can only ever come from a talent such as Dick.

You probably know more Ray Bradbury stories than you think. I first became aware of Ray Bradbury after hearing some of his stories adapted for radio (I don’t own one of those TV box things). Here was another great imagination. Bradbury was another craftsman in the trade of short stories and had started writing them from the age of 12. The Golden Apple of the Sun is a 1953 collection that contains stories such as "The Fog Horn" which ended up being adapted for the cinema as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Despite being written some time ago these stories are skilled and fresh today. Other short story collections by Bradbury with their links to The Twilight Zone will also impress you with their sheer original range of horror and paranoia. 

What an atmospheric set of stories. When I first read these as a boy, I remember I never wanted the book to end. There are several Sherlock Holmes collections but this was the first I read. At the start of the book I couldn’t quite relate to "A Scandal in Bohemia," but some of his more famous stories such as "The Red-Headed League" and "The Five Orange Pips" are contained within this collection. Some of the film adaptations are only loosely based on these stories so they are well worth the read. The character of Holmes in particular is richer and stronger in the stories than it is portrayed in the many films. You can almost taste the pipe tobacco and London fogs. The sense of class division is apparent throughout. It must have been a good time to live, so long as you were one of the gentry. Holmes’ human shortcomings are also apparent when in need of mental stimulation in an age a century before media came to entertain us. Narrated by Dr. Watson, memorable characters such as Inspector Lastrade make their first appearances in this volume. Essential reading and will continue to be so!

This is often overlooked by readers of Dickens. I think the term “sketches” is important here at a point where Dickens was still experimenting with his art and particularly his characters which were always going to be his greatest strength. Sketches by Boz is a collection of fascinatingly detailed insights into London life intertwined in episodes (or scenes) as Dickens terms it through a richly caricatured study of a set of interesting lives of the working classes, in a way that only Dickens has ever been able to do. The “sketches” had, prior to this, been serialized in weekly installments (the soap operas of the day). Dickens had experienced sufficient highs and lows of social mobility in his own life to fully qualify his portrayals. "The Tuggses at Ramsgate" is perhaps for me the most memorable but the whole volume is bursting with energetic individuality and character. I have always deliberately left reading Dickens’ work until the winter to add to the atmosphere. How London has changed from this, and not all of it for the better!