After a week and a half, I finally finished this hard cover book of the “best” short stories of Henry Kuttner. This is from three boxes of hardcover books that my brother found at a garage sale. The reason it took so long to read this is that the stories were not very good.

The best story, Mimsy Were The Borogroves, I had read before. The story is not that great a story. It is an interesting idea, but Kuttner doesn’t take it anywhere and as a result it winds up with just the expected outcome.

Another story, What you Need was cut up and turned into a classic Twilight Zone. It has the O Henry ending that you see so often in the series, and as such is not much of a story.

One story, Nothing but Gingerbreak Left, involved intentionally writing a song or poem that people would get into their heads and not be able to shake. In the story, the song was written in German and Hitler gets it stuck in his head and it helps shorten the war. Kuttner stole the idea from me by going ahead in a time machine and reading my idea log. Now I can’t write my version of it.

Overall I was not happy with the collection and avoided reading when I was tired. The best part of the book was Ray Bradbury’s introduction and the Kelley Freas cover.