Beginning the Decameron Project

 Reading short stories is different from reading novels because short stories are less time-consuming.  With a short story, there are a lot less pages than a novel, so you finish the story a lot quicker.  This means that the overall message and themes of the short stories are clearer, and you can identify them more quickly.  As an example, in novels like Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, we noted concrete imagery in the beginning and hoped that we would find out what those images meant by the end of the novel.  It was hard to analyze what all of the images meant together without finishing the novel, which took hours.  On the other hand, in short stories, you do not have to wait so long to discover what the images mean.  

I think that the two short stories that I have read so far were surprisingly interesting.  I like how I could relate to the stories since there are a lot of references to the coronavirus pandemic like Zoom, social distancing, and washing hands.  I thought that Lavalle's story really highlighted the negative effects of a pandemic on mental health by referencing depression or despair in the characters.  I thought that this was an important part of the pandemic to remember.  I thought that Shamsie's story highlighted how the world has changed because of the pandemic.  There almost seemed to be a happy ending to the story as now the world seemed more kind and safe.  Both of the stories demonstrated to me that people long for social interactions.  Therefore, I think that both of these stories had really important messages about the pandemic.