I don’t buy this one. I did buy, I think, the collected stories that I read last year. In that one, it was 700 or so pages of these kinds of small stories and like this one, the list was long and most of the stories were a paragraph at most and sometimes a sentence too. For some reason, that one more or less worked for me. I think that was I felt at the time was that it was interesting, and I was willing to go with it and suspend my dubious nature for the length of the book.
But what I realized when I started reading this one, and almost immediately after I started reading this one is that I apparently had exactly one book in me for this kind of writing. Even the similarities I saw in Joy Williams’s book 99 Stories of God was something different in my mind because there was a clearer structure with the stories. This one feels so random and cheap that I can’t find the structure even.
This one felt like Lydia Davis doing her best Lydia Davis impression and so as I got more and more into it, I was more and more annoyed with the output.
So my verdict is that maybe I had exactly one Lydia Davis book in me, and that’s ok, so it’s probably good that I chose the longest one first.
The fault is definitely in my stars in general. I shouldn’t read things I know going into I probably won’t like, but still I didn’t like it.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Wont-Stories-Lydia-Davis/dp/0374118582/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1549913438&sr=8-1)