I was hungry for some quality short stories, and I hadn't read a Julian Barnes book in a while (used to be my favorite contemporary writer) and so I picked up The Lemon Table, a collection of 11 stories about the bitterness of growing old. I wasn't disappointed. What struck me is how good Barnes is at crafting different "voices", and he never pulls the same stylistic trick twice. If I had to name a favorite, I guess it would be Hygiene, in which a regular visit to the out-of-town hooker is met with disappointment, but if you're a fan of Barnes' more postmodern work, like Flaubert's Parrot, check out Knowing French, which is written as correspondence to the author.