Although I have not been a great reader of short stories in the past, that never stopped me from buying collections of them anyway. I think what has held me back from reading more short stories, is that faced 
with choosing a book to read, I nearly always choose a straightforward novel. I've always felt that if I pick up a collection of short stories, I was meant to read the stories straight through from cover to cover--like a novel. I'm not so sure that is the best way to approach them, however. I think I'd like to pick and choose stories at random, as I've been selecting ghost stories for the last couple of months. Some collections are smaller, or the stories interwoven, so they seem to lend themselves to reading the book as a whole, in (more or less) one go. But large collections of stories by one author or anthologies by multiple authors--I think I'd rather take them in smaller doses here and there (I seem to be much more apt to read them in this situation--just one or two rather than faced with an entire book). Besides, is there a correct way to read short stories anyway? I do have Kate Sutherland's All in Together Girls, which I would like to read in its entirety. Dorothy read it earlier this year and enjoyed it and a quick glance through makes me think I will, too.
As for picking and choosing, just a cursory look at my shelves and I came up with these collections (I actually have others, but these were the handiest to grab):
- Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories, F. Scott Fitzgerald -- I've always been intrigued by the sound of this story
- Collected Stories, Elizabeth Bowen -- 79 stories-love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz
- Fifty Stories, Kay Boyle -- Set in Paris in the 20s, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California
- Across the Bridge, Mavis Gallant -- Paris stories
- The Collected Stories, Eudora Welty
- First Love and Other Stories, Ivan Turgenev
- The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett -- This was a gift from a friend in Germany who studied American Lit and works as a translator
- Wilderness Tips, Margaret Atwood
- The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, Maeve Brennan
- Selected Stories, Alice Munro
- A Vocation and a Voice, Kate Chopin -- I've read some of her stories and enjoyed them very much
- A New England Nun and Other Stories, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman -- Like Chopin, this author is known as a regionalist
Now it is a matter of which story to choose first. I think I'd like to read pairs of stories that are similar in some way in order to compare and contrast. Mostly, though, I just want to enjoy a good story. How to write about them after the fact is something I am still working out. I feel like I am just giving plot summaries. It's amazing how much meaning an author can infuse into just a few pages, but I'm not sure I catch everything each time. No doubt how I read, what I read, and what I get out of the story will likely change as I go along.
One more thing--the new Persephone Books Biannually and catalog have arrived! Nobody does elegant quite like Persephone Books does it. They also sent along a crisp, new catalog along with the newsletter and a bookmark. I will be reading the Biannually this weekend lusting after the new books and making note of all the books in the catalog that I want to order (they are redesigning some of them with artsy covers--very lovely). I'll have to be satisfied with looking at the moment, but I have plenty of unread Persephones to keep me busy for a while in any case.