I don’t often purchase books of short stories. I’m more likely to get a book of essays based on someone’s real life — most recently Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, a fine book of essays on fatherhood, that included the piece “A Textbook Father” that was so real and so funny on the subject of fathers and daughters and sex that I sent it to my brother. I also enjoyed Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, which I can’t decide whether to put in the essay section or the fiction section of my bookshelves. Part poetry, part stories, part essays that seem more like Alexie’s view of his reality, it’s a book that moved me deeply. And I’m not even a poetry fan.

Occasionally, I do buy short fiction. Something on the cover or a review just gets me. Sometimes it’s only because the book is by an author I’ve already come to love. That’s the case with Bailey White’s Nothing with Strings. She tells stories of the south that make it sound like a place I’d like to visit, with people I’d like to meet. She is a fine writer, who tells stories that are touching without being cloying, like “Lonesome Without You”, which details a loving tribute from a boy to a nurse who helped his mother when she was ill.

The best two books of short stories that I’ve read lately are very different from each other. The first one I picked up because I saw it advertised in an issue of Heeb magazine, a publication for young Jews. I’m probably too old for the magazine’s demographics, and the book cover screams “Generation Y”, but I still ordered it. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God by Etgar Keret has been critically acclaimed in the writer’s native Israel and the United States, and his stories have been made into films that have been likewise critically acclaimed.

I enjoyed some of the stories — particularly “Kneller’s Happy Campers”, which was made into the film Wristcutters: A Love Story. But half the time I felt too old for them and not nearly hip enough. Still, it was nice to see what was out there that fans of Jonathan Safran Foer and his of-the-moment counterparts might be reading. Oh, and I like Foer, particularly Everything is Illuminated.

But my favorite recent short story acquisition so far has been The People on Privilege Hill, a series of stories by Jane Gardam that includes some of the characters from her novel Old Filth. I haven’t read the novel yet, but plan to do so because I so enjoyed the characters (and writing) in the former book. The stories weren’t linked, except in that sometimes they included some of the same people living in the same town in England. It reminds me in tone of Jane Austen, so you know I’m going to like it.

They are stories about manners, behavior, the distance between young and old that is often more than years. When I think of the book as a whole, it reminds me of when I lived in Ireland — days that were grey and drizzly and seemed on the surface to be dull and dreary, but were really full of texture and gradations of color and sensations of warm and cold right next to each other. They aren’t necessarily happy stories, but they aren’t sad. They aren’t grim, but not really funny. They are many things all at once.

I know there will be other books of short stories in my future — any book by Alice Munro or Garrison Keillor or David Sedaris. But when my shelves are full at the end of my life and someone is packing up all my books to ship to some under-served rural library, most of the boxes will be full of long fiction. There are only so many hours in the day to read (unfortunately), so I’ll stick mostly to the thing I love best.