Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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 […]

Random Randomness with Random People in Random Places Randomly

A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris

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A Carnival of Snackery: Diaries 2003-2020 by David Sedaris is basically what you’d expect from the subtitle and if you’re familiar with the author. It’s really just random collection of things seen or thought by the author over 17 years. The title doesn’t become clear until March 2013 and that’s never explained. But that’s probably the point, to make you try to reason it out, if there is actual meaning or if Sedaris just thought it sounded cool. It reads kind of like a stand-up […]

“Have a blessed day.”

Calypso by David Sedaris

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It’s been a while since I’ve read a book by David Sedaris, but when I saw Calypso (2018) available at the library on Audiobook, I decided it would be the perfect thing to listen to on my commute. I vaguely remember enjoying Sedaris’s other books, but this one might just be my favorite. With stories about his family, his partner, his vacation house, and his eccentricities, I was thoroughly entertained. I especially enjoyed listening to Sedaris read his book. It’s his life, after all, and his timing […]



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