Book Review: "Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories" edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

The Everyman's Pocket Classics Collection does not fit in your pocket as it states. These books, though they are small, are normally quite thick in length and therefore, unless you have very big and deep pockets - will not fit. That was just a bit of a complaint I had about the name.

Anyways, I have read many Everyman's Pocket Classics in my lifetime with most of my focus being on the Pocket Poets collection. My favourites among them are the collection on poetry about Art and Artists, the one on Musicians and obviously the Blues Poems. There are more, including the poetry of John Keats, Lord Byron and Arthur Rimbaud that are also among my personal favourites of the collection. Recently, I have moved on to looking at other collections in the 'pockets' subsection. And here is the review of Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories.

The book starts off familiar with a story I have read before called The Lost Blend by O.Henry - a story that appears in the Wordsworth Classics Edition of 100 Stories by O. Henry as well. It is a fine way to start the collection, but personally - there would have been far more use to the anthology if it dragged me in more. O. Henry's story is increasingly romanticising the state of the said drink, but I would have started off with a bang such as Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado which appears later in the anthology.

One thing I did enjoy is that there were stories from every kind of great writer. First and foremost we had O. Henry, as we go through, we get a story by Mark Twain (which I would have personally put before the story by O. Henry but after the one by Edgar Allan Poe if I were editing the collection). Later on in the anthology we get a story by the writer of Guys and Dolls, Damon Runyon and then one by Call of the Wild author Jack London. If you see what I mean, you'll notice that when you read it, all of these are brilliant stories - there is not a single bad story in there. But, the order seems like it was simply thrown together, there is no method to the organisation and I would put the blame on not mainly the editor, but whoever had a hand in creative control.

One thing I got confused about is that later on in the anthology, it moves from Penelope Lively to Charles Dickens and honestly, when I am reading an anthology personally, I don't like to be thrown around from atmosphere to atmosphere, from time frame to time frame. I would suggest the following options in order to make this anthology more pleasant to read: the first option is to go in time order from the oldest story all the way down to your F. Scott Fitzgeralds and later. The second option would be to alternate between light and dark stories throughout the course of the anthology and the third option would be to go through stories that are plot based and stories that are character based, again alternating between the two throughout.

So, though the stories themselves are beautiful representatives of appreciations and harsh critiques of drink culture, I would say that this anthology requires an extra revision in terms of organisation. Most people read anthologies to feel at ease, as a relaxive piece of reading. We don't tend to read anthologies to be thrown around from different time frames and atmospheres, from one story to another of which we cannot follow a pattern.