This was my Halloween gift to myself this 2008, and it was a good one. These stories are mostly entertaining, but the compiler admits he has edited some of them so they did not communicate the same, and I think i could sit down with him and the book and point out the stories he has done that with.An Side here: I've just found that the new English allows (yea, even approbates) prepositions ending the sentence. After a lifetime of sounding as if Jane Austin or Samuel Richardson had inhabited my mind, I can now be natural and correct. Well, that's doing something despite the way you were taught not to do it, and that's what M. San Souci has done to many stories in this book. If he had left them alone, it would have gone to five stars. ( )