Collected Short Stories Book

I can't believe that Huxley could honestly say that he wasn't good at visualizing things. He said LSD helped him with this, but these stories were all written before he really did LSD and they are full of imagery and paint themselves very vividly in the reader's mind. What I've always loved most about Huxley is his grasp of the heartbreak of being human. In fact, reading these stories I felt at times that my mind relates to Huxley more than any other author I've read. I looked up his birth chart and it turns out we actually have very similar energies in our "primal triad" (both Leos...I have a Taurus Ascendant, he has Moon in Taurus as well as Venus...ruler of Taurus...on the Ascendant...my Moon is Aquarius and we both have Aquarius Midheavens.) As I read the stories, I thought, "Damn...every other one of these ends in murder or suicide!" which wouldn't seem so odd except these stories are generally a lot less brutal in style than "Brave New World" or "Ape And Essence". In fact, at times I struggled through some stories because of the tedious English-ness of the dialogue. In the end, though, it was well worth it. My favorites here are "Young Archimedes" (which is truly heartbreaking) "The Portrait" and "Chawdron"...these latter two are just ingenious all the way around. Honorable mentions go to "Nuns At Luncheon" for it's darkly humo(u)rous twist at the end and "Half-Holiday" because there's a part of every man that can relate to the poor bastard of a main character in it.