Friday, January 17, 2014

Naked by David Sedaris

From Goodreads:

Welcome to the hilarious, strange, elegiac, outrageous world of David Sedaris. In Naked, Sedaris turns the mania for memoir on its ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview-a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable. A tart-tongued mother does dead-on imitations of her young son's nervous tics, to the great amusement of his teachers; a stint of Kerouackian wandering is undertaken (of course!) with a quadriplegic companion; a family gathers for a wedding in the face of imminent death. Through it all is Sedaris's unmistakable voice, without doubt one of the freshest in American writing.

I always enjoy David Sedaris's writing. This one is a little darker than his normal fare, dealing with his compulsive tendencies as a child and his mother's lung cancer (at one point I was like, "I'm not sure this is supposed to be funny?") but his trademark wit is still there. I listened to the audio book version, which he always narrates his books himself. It helps a lot to have him reading his own writing, especially when dealing with the darker humor. He injects lightness into the writing that I'm not sure I would have picked up on if I was reading it on the page. 

Not my favorite of his but still worth the time. 

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