Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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If you’ve ever read David Sedaris, you know exactly what this is.

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

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How different cultures view intellectuals and their place in society always fascinates me. In France, prime time TV; if such a thing still exists in the streaming age; features high-brow, thoughtful debate. It sounds great to some, but then every speech needs to start with “As Moliere once said…” so it’s not all win-win. The Anglophone world seems to me to view intellectualism, and by that I mean careful, considered thought and subsequent arguments, with a mixture of “Gosh, isn’t that person witty” (Oscar Wilde, […]

A soldier’s diary from the front lines of seasonal employment

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

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My costume is green. I wear green velvet knickers, a yellow turtleneck, a forest-green velvet smock, and a perky stocking cap decorated with spangles. This is my work uniform. ― David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice I’ve read this, listened to the public radio broadcast of David Sedaris’s reading, and I’ve seen a performance of The Santaland Diaries. It’s been a while, so this was a fun yet illuminating reread. David is a thirty-three-year-old man hired to be an elf at Santaland in at Macy’s in […]

Amusing with a dash of heartbreak

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

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While never a huge David Sedaris fan, I started to appreciate his approach to writing when I read the excerpts from his personal diaries during the pandemic. Sedaris focuses on the little, absurd things in life and weaves an essay around them. His off-the-wall, probing questions might seem unsettling to some, but I suspect he’d make a fantastic dining companion and a hoot to have at parties. For example, in an essay titled “Six to Eight Black Men,” he talks about how he makes a […]

Putting the fun in dysfunctional

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

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Cbr14bingo Holiday/bingo Holidays on Ice is a collection of David Sedaris essays, some previously published and some new, all related to holidays. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and Halloween are all represented through autobiographical reflections as well as imaginative fictional stories. If you are unfamiliar with Sedaris, you should know that his writing is both hilarious and often shocking. He has a talent for making very inappropriate and unsettling statements but often in such a funny way that you laugh anyway. Like many people I became familiar […]

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Learning to Talk

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris

Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel

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Families! Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim – 3/5 Stars I went looking for some pictures of David Sedaris and his family after listening to the audiobook here and stumbled upon the article about the suicide of his sister Tiffany. Along with that article came some additional writings by people responding to it. This book is probably the strongest version of “You Can’t Go Home Again” in Sedaris’s writing, especially as it pertains not only to his sister, but to various of conversation represented […]

Sedaris’s best collection since When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Happy Go Lucky by David Sedaris

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I approach a David Sedaris book in the same way I used to approach an Eminem album with the question “What has happened since the last album?” In the case of Sedaris it’s “What has happened since the last book?”. Sedaris is a fearless writer, sometimes painfully so, and that fearlessness and willingness to expose some ugly behavior make his writing compelling whether you like him or not. Happy Go Lucky was written before and during (because it hasn’t ended) the pandemic. That would be […]



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