First, I should point out that Lindt sells a chocolate bar which has fig and caramel inside of dark chocolate. And it is amazing. Although I’m not sure why I opened it today, since Emily and I made cookies earlier this evening.

Secondly, I should address How We Are Hungry, by Dave Eggers, like I said I would. Briefly and sporadically.

The book seems to be about what it claims in its title (which is rare): hunger, an intensity. Again and again, characters think sudden violent thoughts, wish to hurt, to maim, to savage. These are not violent people, but Eggers is trying to demonstrate an interior sexuality and physicality in humans, in Us, not in the other. And the characters feel intensely, yes, like children. Here in these stories. The violence here, if it actually occurs, which it rarely does, is sudden, senseless, without conclusion.

As are the stories. This is my main complain with so much of modern short fiction — it manages to sketch a character, to demonstrate an emotion, but then what? Where’s the story? What am I to conclude? I really like Eggers’ short-shorts, because I don’t need to conclude with these — but I don’t want to, either, because they’re of a size where I can hold them, think about them. But after reading 25-pages about a suicide attempt by a man’s cousin, I just . . . want something to happen, you know?

This was a major complaint against Karen Russell’s imaginative, dazzling stories, which I really liked; this is something Raymond Carver somehow manages to side-step. But I don’t feel like Eggers is dealing with it.

I’m also intrigued, and now I’m switching themes without concluding, by the motif (archetype?) of the damaged character. In one story in this book, “Quiet,” the main character visits an old friend/crush, a woman who is missing one arm. There’s a lot more to her than that, but it just reminded me of the Kelly Link story, where Link’s protagonist dates a woman who lives at home with a nose-less father. That story was more powerful, more crazy, certainly. (Also more magical, in a literal way.) But this — what does Eggers mean by this? Is he just talking about vulnerability?

I think that’s it.