Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls - David Sedaris

    2013; 278 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Essays; Non-Fiction; Anecdotal Humor.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Here's a writing assignment for you.  Compose a 10-page essay on getting a colonoscopy.  There’s one catch, however.  You have to make it entertaining.  Something readers will chuckle at, and that will make them want to immediately read more essays by you.

    After that, write four more essays on these topics: Being robbed while in Hawaii; Litterbugs (in the UK); People ahead of you in lines at food places who won’t stop chatting with the cashier; and Kids throwing temper tantrums in stores.  Remember to make all of them amusing.

    When you’re finished with those, try to think of another 21 topics from your personal experiences to pen essays about.  Make sure that your readers will still find all of them witty and that the stories will resonate with them.

    Now that you've got all these personal anecdotes done, go out and buy David Sedaris’s book, Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls, and see how his tales compare with yours.  I’m guessing you’ll have gained a much greater appreciation for just how challenging it is to write books of this genre.     

What’s To Like...

    Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls is David Sedaris’s seventh book of anecdotal stories about his life, and I’ve read all the previous ones.  There is an eighth one, Calypso, that was just released this past May, but I’ll wait until the hoopla (and price) dies down before snagging it.

    The lengths of the essays are fairly consistent – about 10 pages each (26 chapters covering 278 pages).  Normally, David Sedaris closes these books with a longer narrative, but here the final chapter was a collection of short-&-silly poems about all sorts of breeds of dogs.  I don’t recall the author offering any of his poetry before, and I found these bits of doggy doggerel hilarious.   My other  favorite chapters were:

    08.  Easy, Tiger.  Learning foreign languages (Mandarin and German).

    09.  Laugh, Kookaburra.  Feeding kookaburras and turning off stoves.

    18.  #2 To Go.  Eating "real" Chinese food.

    22.  Day In, Day Out.  Keeping a diary.

    23.  Mind the Gap.  An essay written in English, not in Yankee.

    24.  A Cold Case.  Losing your passport and wallet in Hawaii.

    The book’s contents follow the usual pattern – all the stories are personal experiences, and not in any order - chronological or otherwise.  David Sedaris is a writer by profession, gay, grew up in a crazy family, travels extensively promoting his books, and has lived in various parts of the world, including New York, North Carolina, England, France and Italy.  A couple of the chapters were written in wingnut style, and one was written in Britspeak.

    I delighted in the details. In one chapter, he recounts spending some time in a city called Brindisi, a place I’d never heard of.  His insights about living in France  were LOL funny.  I shuddered while reading the chapter on colonoscopies since I’m overdue and avoiding my first one.  It was neat to see he’s familiar with Edith Pargeter’s (aka, Ellis Peters') Brother Cadfael novels.  And the chapter about his compulsion of picking up litter resonated with me; for a while we had a guy in our neighborhood who did the same thing, at 5:30 every morning, even when it was pitch black outside.  I know because I’d see him every morning as I left for work.

    You should keep in mind there are R-rated words and adult situations in the book.  Art Linkletter would have a cow.  Misogynists and homophobes should steer clear; David Sedaris is unashamedly married, and unashamedly gay.  Finally, in case you’re wondering, the titular owls show up in Chapter 17; but the diabetes never appears.  Wikipedia gives a brief explanation for the title.

Excerpts...

    Shaun’s father, Hank, was a psychiatrist and sometimes gave his boys and me tests, the type for which there were, he assured us, “no right answers.”  He and his wife were younger than my parents, and they seemed it, not just in their dress but in their eclectic tastes – records by Donovan and Moby Grape shelved among the Schubert.  Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.  (loc. 559)

    There wasn’t a lot of familiar in China.  No pork lo mein or kung pao chicken, and definitely no egg rolls.  On our first night in Chengdu, we joined a group of four for dinner – one Chinese woman and three Westerners.  The restaurant was not fancy, but it was obviously popular.  Built into our table was a simmering cauldron of broth, into which we were to add side dishes and cook them until they were done.  “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering us some tofu, some mushrooms, and some duck tongues,” said the Western woman sitting across from me.  “Do you trust me to keep ordering, or is there anything in particular you might like?”  (loc. 1818)

Kindle Details...

    Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls sells for $11.99 at Amazon.  David Sedaris's other collections of anecdotal essays are all available, and in the $8.99-$14.99 price range.

Did I just refuse to marry my mother?  (loc. 469)

    Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls is another solid installment in the life-&-times of David Sedaris, but I wouldn’t call it my favorite.  This is mostly due to the tone of the book, at least at the start.  For me, the best David Sedaris stories are the ones written in a self-deprecatory style.  But here his mood in a number of them is that of a grumpy old man.  He rants about parents no longer disciplining their kids enough, moans about how crappy of a person his dad was, and whines about having to take swimming classes as a kid.

    If these topics had been tackled with the author’s usual amount of insight and wit, things would’ve been fine.  Unfortunately, here he just seemed like he wanted to vent.

    Maybe he was being too subtle for my dense brain, or maybe he was in a bad mood when he penned some of the chapters..  In any case, he finds his groove about halfway through the book, the wit returns, the tone gets cheerier, and it’s smooth sailing thereafter.

    Or perhaps I was just in a better mood when reading the second half of the book.

    7½ Stars.  One final note.  David Sedaris at long last reveals his secret for coming up with interesting past experiences to write about in book after book.  He’s been keeping diaries, making entries every day, for the past 35 years.  Whenever he needs a new memoir for his next book, he just opens one of the many volumes of his diaries.  Holy OCD-ness, Batman!

When You Are Engulfed In Flames - David Sedaris

    2008; 323 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Essays; Non-Fiction; Anecdotal Humor.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    David Sedaris is gifted, gay, germaphobic writer who grew up in North Carolina in a household that could be the collective poster-children for “Dysfunctional Family”.  Now (herein defined as when he wrote this book)  in his early 50’s , he’s held a number of jobs, had several relationships, and lived in places ranging from the mundane (New York City), to the exotic (France and Japan).

    He’s had his share of weird neighbors (haven’t we all?), crazy relatives, rundown apartments, and cheap hotel rooms that would give and germaphobe nightmares.  He’s also had his boozing, pot-smoking, cigarette-smoking stages (haven’t we all?), and came out okay on the other side of each.  Does he possibly have some wild, hilarious tales to tell about his life?

    You betcha.

What’s To Like...

    When You Are Engulfed In Flames is a set of 22 essays by Sedaris that draw from various parts of his life.  Some of the stories are self-effacing.  I don’t know that I’d write a chapter about a boil on my butt, but Sedaris does.  Several focus on his relationship with his current partner, Hugh, who’s a polar opposite to David in most ways.  Many deal with the slew of bizarre people he’s crossed paths with while traveling and moving about.

    All the essays are witty and well-written.  Some will resonate with you more than others, but all of them will entertain you.  Many close with a bit of thought-provoking introspection by Sedaris after the hijinks have been recounted.  Among my favorites here were :

    The Understudy (the babysitter from hell); That’s Amore (his curmudgeony neighbor, Helen); Monster Mash (working in the morgue); The Man In The Hut (the neighborhood child molester); April In Paris (spiders); Crybaby (switching seats on an airplane); and The Smoking Section (trying to quit smoking).

    I especially liked the stories that were set in France in Japan.  David Sedaris does not pick up a foreign language easily, which leads to the inevitable linguistic misunderstandings and culture shock.  The book’s title comes from an entry at 95%; I’ll leave it to you to discover what it means.

Kewlest New Word . . .

Murphy Bed (n.; phrase) : A bed with a frame and hinges on one end that can be folded up and stored vertically in a wall.

Others : Cush (v.) (which was quite the challenge to find its definition on Google)

Excerpts...

    Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower.  He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again.  (loc. 340)

    It’s funny how certain objects convey a message – my washer and dryer, for example.  They can’t speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I’m doing fairly well.  “No more Laundromat for you,” they hum.  My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can’t cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, “Well, he must be doing something.  My numbers are off the charts.”   (loc. 1713)

Kindle Details...

    When You Are Engulfed In Flames sells for $9.99 at Amazon.  Most of David Sedaris’ other  Essays books go for the same price.

”It’s safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.”  (loc. 3518)

    When You Are Engulfed In Flames is the fourth full-blown book of essays by David Sedaris.  The first three are Naked (1997); Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000); and Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim (2004).  They all have the same template – 20+ “regular-sized” essays, then finishing up with one longer entry, which usually furnishes the book’s title.  I’ve read all of these, and enjoyed each one.  Only DYFiC&D was during my blogging days; it is reviewed here.

    Sedaris’ latest offering of essays is called Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls (2013), but I haven’t read it yet.  My library doesn’t offer a Kindle version of it, but stocks a number of Hardcover copies.

    David Sedaris is one of the foremost contemporary American humorists, and I am in awe of his continued ability to find entertaining incidents from his life to write about.  All of his “Essays” books are good, and if you haven’t read any of them yet, I highly recommend starting with Naked or Me Talk Pretty One Day.  I remember being blown away by both of them.

    8½ Stars.

In A Sunburned Country - Bill Bryson

   2000; 304 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Anecdotal Humor; Travel.  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

    Australia.  The land that time forgot.  Also the land that the rest of the world forgets about.  Most people’s knowledge of Australia begins and ends with kangaroos, koala bears, boomerangs, and maybe a weird-looking opera house.  Can you name their Prime Minister?  Their ruling party?  Any of the Australian states?

    But Australia is a fascinating, exciting place.  There are so many plants, animals, and geological formations that are found there and nowhere else.  So in the late 1990’s, Bill Bryson made several trips there, to get to know the country and to write a book about it.  In A Sunburned Country chronicles his adventures Down Under.

What’s To Like...

     The book is divided into three sections – one for each of Bryson’s three visits.  The first was a train ride across Australia, from Sydney to Perth.  The second trip was by car, and covered all the major cities in Australia’s southeast quadrant.  The third trip, also by car, ventured into Australia’s smaller cities, and the interior.  There is a map at the front of the book.  Bookmark it (Kindle) or dog-ear it (book); you’ll be referring to it frequently.

    Bill Bryson’s activities in any given city can be habitual.  Find the parks and walk through them.  Find the museums and walk through them.  Find the used bookstores and browse through them.  Find the pubs and restaurants and eat, drink, and be merry.  Find the hotel and enjoy or endure the amenities.  This could get tediously repetitive in the hands of a lesser writer, but Bryson's storytelling is superb, and I never was bored with any of his tales.

    There are also numerous and humorous “asides” as Bryson becomes immersed in the local culture.  You’ll be mystified by the game of cricket; amused by the rabbit infestation; and amazed by just how many ways the fauna, flora, land, and sea can kill you in Australia.

    But Bryson also tackles more serious topics.  It may be amusing to envision the predator-less rabbits running wild across the outback, but the devastation they and other imported plants and animals did to the indigenous landscape is both irreversible and borderline criminal.  The small amount of forested area is rapidly being depleted (Australia is the world's #1 exporter of wood chips).  And even more critical is the way the aborigines were, and are, treated.  Heady stuff; not very funny, but Bryson’s insights of such issues are quite thought-provoking.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Antipodean (adj.)  :  the parts of the earth diametrically opposite – often used of Australia and New Zealand contrasted to the Western Hemisphere.  More generally, (anything that is) exactly opposite or contrary.

Excerpts...

    On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished.  No trace of the poor man was ever seen again.  This seemed doubly astounding to me – first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.  (pg. 3)

    “Dining room’s closed, mate,” said one of the two guys at the bar.  “Chef’s crook.”

    Crook means ill.

    “Must’ve ate some of his own cooking,” came a voice from the pokies alcove, and we all had a grin over that.

    “What else is there in town?” I asked.

    “Depends,” said the man, scratching his throat thoughtfully.  He leaned toward me slightly.  “You like good food?”

    I nodded.  Of course I did.

    “Nothin’, then.”  He went back to his beer.  (pg. 182)

 “I tell you, Barry, he was farting sparks!”  (pg.  92)

    The wit in In A Sunburned Country is topnotch; the narrative is totally entertaining; and the book can also stand on its own as a Tour Guide for anyone contemplating a vacation in Oz.  It is also obvious that Bill Bryson researched the subject matter thoroughly.  My only advice would be to read it in bits, to keep it from feeling repetitive.  There are only so many ways to describe the summer heat in the desert outback.

    I read very little non-fiction (maybe one book a year), because the books are often dry and boring.  So it was refreshing to read something from this genre that entertained from start to finish, while still giving me a much better picture of Australia.  I still can’t tell you who the Prime Minister is, but I am now able to tell you at least a half-dozen ways to easily meet your demise there.

    9½ Stars.  Highly recommended.

If You Fly With The Crows - Neal Sillars

    2010; 193 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre :  Anecdotal Humor.  Overall Rating : 6*/10.

    Rab Sinclair has a steady career in retail.  Well, that’s nicespeak for stocking the shelves at the local grocery store.  It pays the bills, albeit barely, and keeps him happily drinking beer and eating donner kebabs for supper.  But his class reunion is coming up in a couple of months, and compared to the bios some of his former classmates have posted at Friends Reunited (especially his ex-GF Caroline), shelf-stocker seems a bit underwhelming.

    The time has come for a career change.  But to what?  Well, how about something entrepreneurial?  Find a need, supply a product, make a profit.  How difficult can that be?.

What’s To Like...
    The setting is Scotland, and the book gives you a nice feel for the daily life of the common man there.  Neal Sillars is Scottish by birth, and a lot of the dialogue is in the mother tongue (“So A’ll be needin tae borrow ma da’s motor, if that’s awright, Mam.”).  Some may find this tiresome, but I thought it added to the scene-setting.

    The author has a lot of fun with various literary devices – the Fourth Wall, flashbacks, a deus ex machina or two, and the always-popular MacGuffin.  This is not a book for the kiddies – there is some cussing, and Rab turns to sex toys for his product line.  Ah, but the tartan dildo is a clever marketing …um… device.

    The humor will not be to everyone’s taste, and Rab will not be everyone’s idea of a hero.  Both remind me of the “Flashman” series, penned by George MacDonald Fraser, another Scottish writer.  Personally, I am not a big Flashman fan, but to each his own.

Excerpts...
    “It’s a Windsor knot you’re wanting there, Son.  Look at the states of that knot!  Who would ever say you were a son of mine?”
    The look of disgust on his face appeared genuine and I must confess that what he said did make me think, but I couldn’t imagine my mum having ever been with anyone else but dad.  (loc. 638)

    We’re not big on cocktails in Lanarkshire and I don’t think it’s just an issue of price.  We have an unspoken macho code which limits many of the things men are allowed to do.  We don’t cry, we don’t wear vests, we eat food which is so spicy that it is barely edible and we don’t walk about holding hands with our girlfriends unless we have just started going out, to name but a few of these unwritten rules.  (loc. 3063)

Kindle Details...
    If You Fly With The Crows sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  Neal Sillars has several other books for sale there, but ANAICT, none are of the humor genre.

“If ye fly wi the craws, ye’ll die wi the craws, Robert!” (loc. 231)
    IYFWTC has plenty of wit, insight, and musings.  Unfortunately, these asides come via way too many tangents, which simply overshadow the storyline.  Rab’s business is an instant success, girls can’t wait to hop into bed with him, and even when he’s trussed up and dangling from a crane in Colombia, you know he’s going to be okay, since he’s writing/telling the story to you.

    All this makes for very little literary tension, capped off by an ending that just sort of winds down rather than building to a climax.  6 Stars because, although it wasn’t a compelling story, neither was it boring; and it’s refreshing to read a story about Scotland that doesn’t sound like it’s straight out of National Geographic.  Add two more stars if you think that Flashman really is your kind of hero.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim - David Sedaris

2004; 257 pages. #1 National Bestseller, whatever that means. Genre : Anecdotal Humor; Semi-autbiography. Overall Rating : "C".

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22 stories from David Sedaris about growing up in a dysfunctional family and coping with a world that still gets freaked out by gays. The time period is roughly from the 5th Grade to the present.

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What's To Like...

As always, there are some laugh-out loud funny tales here. Rooster At The Hitchin' Post is about Sedaris' younger brother's wedding, performed by a psychic found in the phone book, and with music by JD the DJ who by day works in the penitentiary.

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Possession is about looking for the perfect apartment with his partner, Hugh, only to discover the two of them have very different ideas about decor and ambiance. In fairness, David is smitten by Anne Frank's apartment in Amsterdam (which is a museum and not for rent), so Hugh's choices were probably the more sensible.

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For a change, not all the stories are zany. Baby Einstein is about the family coping with the complications at the birth of brother Paul's first child. Everyone survives, but just barely, and Paul's wife, Kathy, can have no more babies. Chicken in the HenHouse is Sedaris stressing out about the public's misconception (at least in his mind) that gay guys are also by definition pedophiles.

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Unfortunately, some of the stories were neither funny nor heartwarming. Let It Snow is about the Sedaris kids, out in wintry weather and bored, convincing the youngest sister to trustingly lay down in the middle of the road in order to make cars swerve to miss her. Mom gets wind of it, comes out and cusses out all her kids, and that's that.

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Kewl & New Words...

Just a couple, and they're mostly technical ones. Delft : a style of glazed earthenware - usually white with blue decoration (think Dutch china). Découpage : art produced by decorating a surface with cutouts, usually of paper. (as a youngster, Sedaris had done this to the electrical wall sockets in his bedroom). Sedaris also assumed I knew who Dorothea Lange was. You're not acquainted with her either? Here's her Wiki entry.

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Excerpts...

He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking. Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat popsicle. I phoned one night just as he was leaning a family pack of frozen chicken wings against the back door. He'd forgotten to defrost them and was now attempting to stomp the solid mass into three 6-inch portions, which he'd stack in a pile and force into his toaster oven. (pg. 167, talking about his brother, Paul).

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They'd been living together for more than a year when I finally met the girlfriend, a licensed hairdresser named Kathy. Erase the tattoos and the nicotine patch and she resembled one of the tranquil Flemish madonnas, the ubiquitous Christ child replaced by a hacking pug. Her grace, her humor, her fur-matted sweaters - we loved her immediately. Best of all, she was from the North, meaning that should she and Paul ever conceive a child, it stood a fifty-fifty chance of speaking understandable English. (pg. 169-70).

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I was on the front porch, drowning a mouse in a bucket...

Before Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004) there was Naked (1997) and Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000). I enjoyed both of the earlier books immensely; but this one felt "meh". Maybe there were only so many hilarious incidents in Sedaris' life, and those got mostly used up in the first two books. If so, that doesn't bode well for his most-recent offering, When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008), which I haven't read yet.

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I recommend this book to anyone who wants a glimpse of the more human side of Sedaris. But if it's non-stop madcap stories you want, pick up the earlier works. We'll give it a "C", cuz it's not bad overall. But I admit it - I read Sedaris strictly for the humor.