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Loading... Holidays on Ice: Storiesby David Sedaris
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A short fast read! Some may find a few humorous anecdotes, but every story was too crude for my taste. Especially the crack baby, that was put in the washer and dryer and died. I would not recommend this author. ( )If you’re my age or anywhere near it, you’re pretty much genetically disposed to have an abiding fondness for David Sedaris. He’s sarcastic, funny, satirical and a little outrageous, but in a very low-key way. Strangely enough, every now and then he’s a little too outrageous for me; a few of the short essays found in this holiday collection were a little over the top for my taste, particularly “Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family!”, for example. That’s the thing about Sedaris. You’re reading along, smirking, and then sometimes he pushes it just over the edge and you’re left feeling mildly uncomfortable with your earlier snark. On the other hand, “The SantaLand Diaries” is perfection in every line, even with its edginess and all the snark you would have to imagine a grown man working as an Elf in Macy’s would have to have. An amusing collection of holiday-related stories. This is the first of Sedaris' work I've read (as opposed to listening on NPR) and I was a little underwhelmed; they elicited a couple of grins and guffaws, but left little that was memorable. I'll likely return to his work at some point in the future to see if my opinion changes. Starts with a great essay on being a Macy’s Elf, then gets unpleasant: the humor is about how clueless, racist, insensitive, and overall horrible the narrators are, with ludicrous exaggerations of current cultural phenomena, and they don’t work as satire because they’re just too broad. His nonfiction, though obviously it’s as carefully curated as the fiction, is better because it has to be constrained by plausibility and thus can actually do some incisive work. Or maybe because his major target is usually himself, which takes a bunch of the meanness out of it. I enjoyed the author's observations working as a holiday elf very much. Didn't care much for the following essays though. no reviews | add a review
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(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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