9) Completely Unexpected Tales, by Roald Dahl

This volume combines the short story collections Tales of the Unexpected and More Tales of the Unexpected – I must have read the latter some time, but a lot of the stories in the former were new to me, eg the one with the disembodied brain which I think I would certainly have remembered. They are all real masterpieces, and actually reading them all at one go is probably not the best way to enjoy them – they are best piece by piece.

(NB – keeping tabs on this in my reading from now on – none of these stories passes the Bechdel test. Most have male narrators or viewpoint characters; the closest approach to a pass is “The Umbrella Man”, where the twelve-year-old narrator and her mother do discuss the eponymous umbrella but mostly discuss the eponymous man.)