The Circular Ruins by Jorge Luis Borges My rating: 3 of 5 stars When is a short story, not a short story? Do you include a short story as a ‘book read’ on Goodreads, or does the collection include one book? We had a family debate on this over Christmas and concluded that if a book is worthy of a separate review, it counts as a book. I sometimes must reread Borges's short stories three or more times to understand them. In some ways, the books seem as recursive as some of the motifs included. The narrative arc, where there is one, continues to increase like a Shepard-Risset glissando (the audio illusion where the pitch of the ensemble of frequencies is ever-increasing). “The Circular Ruins” is a case in point: a mysterious meditation on creation, consciousness, and the nature of reality. Borges crafts a world where a lone dreamer attempts to bring a man into existence, only to confront the possibility that he is merely a dream. The circular ruins i...