The older I get, the more I appreciate short stories. This weekend, I read “Bartleby, the Scrivener” for the first time. How did I miss out on this my whole life? In a neat little package of less than an hour of reading time, Herman Melville gifts us with a funny, rebellious, quietly absurd story that can be interpreted as many different ways as there are readers who read it. What a feat! I’m still thinking about Bartleby, and his flabbergasted boss, and his fellow scriveners Turkey and Nippers and Ginger Nut, and his unshakable, unmovable, “I would prefer not to.” Bartleby, the OG quiet quitter.

Over the past decade or so*, I’ve grown to crave a good short story. Novels are still my go-to — I want the immersiveness of a novel over a long period of reading time. But on the weekends, or sometimes in the evening, or on long walks at the beginning of the month, when the latest reading on the New Yorker Fiction podcast drops (like today!), I like to read a short story or two, similar to how people used to read the Sunday paper in the leisure time of the weekend.

After reading Bartleby, I started thinking about the short stories I’ve loved. Some I return to and read or listen to them again, like Elizabeth Taylor’s “The Letter Writers,” which is hilarious and sad and just as relevant in the time of texting and emailing as it was in the time it was published (1958), when people corresponded through paper letters sent in the mail. Some I remember scenes from that I will always remember for as long as I live, like the vampires in “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” sinking their teeth into lemons. Some I’ll remember the wonder they made me feel, or the horror, or the wow, this captures humanity in all our glory and terror.

Here are some of my favorites:

• “The Letter Writers” by Elizabeth Taylor
• “The Stone” by Louise Erdrich (read by Karen Russell)
• “The Ghost Birds” by Karen Russell
• “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka (really a novella)
• “The Ballad of the Sad Café” by Carson McCullers (also a novella)
• “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” by Karen Russell
• “Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey” by Haruki Murakami
• “The Jockey” by Carson McCullers
• “Barn Burning” by Haruki Murakami
• “In the Middle of the Fields” by Mary Lavin (read by Colm Tóibín)
• “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson (of course)
• “The Silence” by Zadie Smith
• “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Herman Melville
• “The Swimmer” by John Cheever

Today is Sunday, and I have a new story next to me to read today. Weekends are the best.

*When I was about to publish this post, the “short-stories” tag autofilled when I started typing, and I thought, oh, I already have a tag for this? It looks like my conversion began in 2013.