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3.5/5
There can be at times circumstances that affect your thoughts on what's being read. Or even just the way that you read it. This is one of those very occasion where I will undoubtedly benefit reading again. It's clear to see why Jorge Luis Borges is regarded as one of the 20th century's most inventive writers, and Ficciones is a collection of small stories that are on a grand scale, but my overall problem was going through three or four at a time and finding them hard to digest, jumping from one to another just didn't work for me. And only read the last few days apart giving me a chance to fully think about about them, this worked so much better, but still left me feeling a bit dumbfounded. Also was not reading the best translated version, so that didn't help either.

Borges never compromised himself by writing a novel but instead left a whole library of delicately structured maze-like speculations. Each one is like the Tardis � little time-machines of the imagination and far bigger within than they appear on the outside, and there is certainly plenty to keep one occupied: writers, dreamers, heretics, young men with impossible memories, other worlds revealed by secret encyclopedias, traitors transformed by betrayal, conspirators that plot their own downfall: 17 pieces, none longer than 25 pages; none shorter than a lifetime. It's difficult to pick a favourite but 'Death and the Compass' and 'The Sect of the Phoenix' were two that I read twice.

I am sure this collection will grow on me, and multiple readings built up over time will no doubt chance my perception from reading the first time, into something very special indeed!