Sep 7, 2009

Bedtime reading: Saki & Lydia Davis

I tend to read a few pages before I go to sleep, it's an old habit. At the moment I have by my bedside two books: Saki's Collected Stories and Lydia Davis's collection of short fictions, Almost no Memory.
I love both. Each night, I read a story by Saki, and then a story by Davis.
This makes for the strangest of literary experiences: fictions by Davis, US-centred, written around now, avant-garde, theoretically informed, begin to feel as smart (in the British more than in the US sense), artificial and gimmicky as those by Saki, written for the large readerships of Edwardian Britain's newspapers.
It doesn't work the other way.