Book Thoughts: Borges - Collected Fictions
Near the beginning of 2025 I saw the name "Borges" somewhere online, and everyone gushing about his short stories seemed to be very well-read and smart. I want to be well-read and smart, so I picked up the Penguin Classics Collected Fictions version of Borges's entire body of work (both the audiobook and a physical copy).
There's this problem I have where I always want to read these smart books. The ones that people then say "My gosh, did you really get through all of X?" and then I can give a perfunctory review to show that I have, indeed, made it through all of X and get that small dopamine hit from the mental exhibitionism. It started very early in my childhood, and I distinctly recall trying to get through Ulysses at 14 to prove I could (spoiler: I still have not made it through Ulysses.)
Now, don't get me wrong, this desire is not purely for bragging rights and optics -- I also genuinely want to know the content of these books. I want to experience something in the process. I want to grow and have new thoughts and understand the things that make these books so impactful.
Even as an adult this desire conflicts with the reality of my fairly short attention span. I crave engagement to distract from the various difficulties of life, and more often than not I'll flee into fantasy worlds and scifi stories. For every Seneca, ten George R.R. Martins.
When I find myself a book that is both naturally engaging and intellectually interesting -- well that's a no-brainer.
Back to Jorge Luis Borges, the world-famous Argentine short-story writer I'd never heard of. I was lured in by the promises of wild stories that explore dreams and labyrinths, and the collection delivered manyfold on those promises. I earnestly feel that getting through this collection has changed me in more ways than I can account for -- that may sound fairly performative given my introductory paragraphs, but this collection has accompanied and influenced a somewhat transformative period of my life that has spanned February to September of this year.
I am normally a quick consumer of audiobooks -- It took me only 2 months to burn through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy at the start of 2024, and I got through 13 additional audio titles in that same year. Borges' collection, on the other hand, has taken me 7 months to complete. This hasn't been for dislike of the stories contained, but rather due to me taking more breaks to digest and think about the works, and as a result spending much more time with my own thoughts.
Long ago I began using audiobooks as a mechanism to quiet my overactive brain, drowning out all the thinking with tales and other people's ideas. I realize now that this became, to some degree, an addiction to entertainment. I filled all empty space with other people's words, eschewing boredom, avoiding my own background noise -- at first intentionally, but in recent years this avoidance has simply been habit. The process of reading this collection has reintroduced me to my own thoughts. The spaces between stories gave me time to let ideas spiral, to ponder meaning, and to eventually wander off and think my own thoughts on entirely different topics. I have re-embraced my own boredom as a time to think, to reflect, and to be creative.
This reading has also embedded in me a new appreciation for small projects. While many of Borges' stories were wonderful, equally many bored me or did not impress -- but it came to me that this did not make me dislike the overall body of his work. In this I have discovered a drive to do many small things and be unafraid to release them. While I've always been fond of releasing doodles and sketches into the world, most of my projects have been larger long term endeavors that are either never completed, or I feel aren't "good enough" to let into the world. I have a burning desire now to tackle small-to-medium sized projects -- the short story equivalents of interesting arts. To realize this desire I've started a small art collective at 0dd.company.
I don't have a detailed review of any of the individual short stories here. Some were fantastic, others were boring or flat, much of his prose and deeper meanings was likely wasted on me. These works are studied the world over, and my own capacity for literary critique is inadequate to offer worthwhile insight. The man loved dreams and labyrinths, books and Buenos Aires, and these things came out in all of his works -- sometimes forced, sometimes naturally. Reading the collection front-to-back felt autobiographical in an extremely intimate way; I know very little about the life of Jorge Luis Borges, but at the same time I feel I know the man extremely well. The first collection in this book was published when Borges was 36, the last when we has 84, 3 years before his death. Nearly 100 short stories, plus his forewards and afterwords.
I cried at the end -- not because of any particularly sad story, but because the man I had come to know was dead.
I will put forth my favourite of his works: for all the wonderfully creative and weird works that tickled my brain, the piece that resonated with me the most was The Secret Miracle from the Artifices collection. Artifices itself is one of my less-liked collections in this larger collection, but The Secret Miracle explores a man granted a year frozen in time to complete a masterpiece work within his mind before death. As someone who cannot help but build and forget entire worlds or plan out great never-to-be-attempted projects in my own head, I greatly appreciated this story. To me it said "there is value even in a story that is never told."
I don't know that I've come away from this collection more well-read, or any more capable of appreciating fine literature. I have come away with a fresh appreciation of long strolls within the labyrinth of my own thoughts, and reminded that small works can be enough. A short story can change a mind or teach a lesson, and if it's boring or bland there can be another short story, and another.
Frequently after finishing a large audiobook I feel lost -- almost panicked to find the next great book to sweep me away and fill the empty void. I don't plan to quit audiobooks, but I don't feel that panic this time. There's no rush, and the void isn't so empty as I had feared.
The void is mine to explore.