Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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I am trying to look on the bright side.

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunks by David Sedaris

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Holidays on Ice I feel like I could write a whole essay on things I’ve been told how much I would like and then the actual experience of reading or experiencing those things and how it’s not always let down, but something. I think that’s true about most of my experience with David Sedaris. I like a lot of his stuff, but haven’t read a single thing. What I mean by this is that I don’t think I could imagine sitting down and reading anything […]

The sea section

Calypso by David sedaris

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I feel compelled to quote not the book but the back cover blurb because Lauren Hubbard said it best: “Age and family occupy beloved humorist Sedaris’s latest collection of essays. His observations feel sharper and often darker than in previous collections, as he ponders the inevitable breakdown of the human body, the shame attendant with illness and age, the nature of addiction, and the eccentricities of his family. Though middle age may have made his shades of gray blacker, the wit and incisiveness that make […]

Inspiring a case of the midnight giggles

Calypso by David Sedaris

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This isn’t so much a review, as a love letter to the mind of David Sedaris. You’ll just have to bear with me here… I first heard David Sedaris on the This American Life podcast. His storytelling was always peppered with humour, wry, and occasionally intensely personal. But what captured me most was his voice. It was so mild… verging on prim at times. Which makes his storytelling all the more engaging, as his voice rarely matches his topics. David Sedaris’ delightfully dark and twisted […]

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

Beowulf by Unknown

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules by David Sedaris

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The whole of this post deals with how we tell stories and who we tell those stories to, and what it means to tell THOSE stories in Those ways. Mostly it’s a handful of audiobook I was listening to this wekeend as I played video games and drove around town.   Aesop’s Fables I teach Aesop’s Fables to students, especially my English 12 (collab/special education) class because it allows us to look very directly for the ways in which we connect the words of the […]

Summer in the Sea Section

Calipso by David Sedaris

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 David Sedaris is one of my favorite authors and this book was just the thing I needed after the more serious books I’ve read recently.   If you know Sedaris’s work then you kind of know what to expect. It’s memoir in short story format. This collection focuses mostly around the beach house he and his partner Hugh purchase on the Carolina coast in the same town his family used to take summer vacations. This gives a lose through line to the book, which mostly […]

Sea Section seems like a perfectly reasonable name for a beach house.

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So I picked Calypso by David Sedaris as my “Brain Candy” square for CBR10 Bingo, which after reading it, seems like maybe not the best choice, because these short stories are a bit darker than usual. Sedaris’ sister Tiffany committed suicide in 2013, and this, his mother’s alcoholism, and a strange tumour growing on his side become the running topics in many of the stories in his first compilation in five years. Calypso is still hilariously funny, in exactly the ways you expect it to be. I’ve always had […]



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