Aunt Hagar's Cram Session

With the next Brooklyn book club meeting in less than a week, you should be heading into your last fifty pages. Unfortunately, you're still stuck on page 12, fighting through "In the Blink of God's Eye."

That's why we got cramming! With limited time to get through 14 thirty-page stories, it's time to get your priorities straight. Figuring out which stories are superior and which are little more than filler, however, is virtually impossible without magic. Lucky for you I've already read the whole book, so I'm in a good position to recommend a good alternative to unreliable, scattershot methods like "random guessing" and "reading the stories in order."

If I had to do it again, and I only had time to read a third of the book, these are the stories I'd tackle first:

Old Boys, Old Girls

Bad Neighbors

A Rich Man

All Aunt Hagar's Children

Blindsided

For my money, those are the five best. If you have more time and want to dig a little deeper, here are another five that probably won't kill you:

Common Law

Spanish in the Morning

The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia

A Poor Guatelmalan Dreams...

Resurrecting Methuselah

And honestly, I would only read these last four if I wanted to capture Edward P. Jones at his least impressive:

Tapestry

In the Blink of God's Eye

Root Worker

Adam Robinson

Good luck, folks, and happy cramming! Hope to see you at 1:30 this Sunday.