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Me Talk Pretty One Day Editorial Review: A new collection from David Sedaris is cause for jubilation. His recent move to Paris has inspired hilarious pieces, including Me Talk Pretty One Day, about his attempts to learn French. His family is another inspiration. You Cant Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers and cashiers with 6-inch fingernails. Compared by The New Yorker to Twain and Hawthorne, Sedaris has become one of our best-loved authors.
Customer Reviews: Best Sedaris collection! This is Sedaris' best collection of short stories/memoirs/autobiographies. His writing is wonderful, in part because it's hard to separate fact from fiction. He has a true gift for writing. My favorite story is the title one but all are great. These stories are great to read all at once or one at a time!
Do Not Read While Eating Because It's So Funny You Might Choke When I opened this book I had limited time so I decided to look for the shortest essay in the book so I could sneak in a quick read. I selected "Big Boy" which started on page 97 and ended before the next essay that started on page 100. By the end of the first paragraph I was already laughing and saying, aloud, "oh geeze". I laughed through all three pages and found myself incredibly impressed with his writing, his insightful observations, and how he captures (through nothing but words) an experience worth sharing with the reader.
When my husband came home from work, I placed the "Big Boy" essage in front of him and said, "you have to read this". Same thing happened. By the end of the first paragraph he had a huge smile and was snickering quietly.
I will never look at a burrito the same way.
This book is a keeper.
David Sedaris does it again! I think I have now read or listened to all of David Sedaris' books or audiobooks. I prefer the audiobooks as he tells it the way he writes it. Just sit back and enjoy. No one tells a story like David Sedaris. You'll laugh til you cry.
Not as funny as I'd hoped. Sedaris describes vignettes from his life in this wry-humored self-deprecating autobiography.
He and I do not share the same sense of humor, so though I did find some of his stories throughout the middle of the text quite funny (particularly the way he described learning French and moving to France), I found the beginning and end of the book tedious reading. Perhaps I didn't read it in the right frame of mind. If I had approached it as a collection of short stories instead of a continuing narrative, I might have enjoyed it better, and I am willing to take the blame for that oversight, though I didn't see any reference to this book as a collection of short stories in any reviews.
In the beginning, Sedaris describes himself as a vapid and shallow child, and a pretentious and annoying art student. As a reader, I simply didn't care about him.
If you can stick with this novel until chapter nine, when Sedaris moves to NYC, his humor kicks into gear and the book becomes very amusing through chapter twenty-three.
After that, subsequent chapters about uncomfortable self-revelations and insomniac fantasies are at times both repulsive and tedious, and divorced from any of the previous text. But then Sedaris finishes with one of the funniest chapters of the whole lot which leaves the reader laughing, but does nothing to draw the whole book together in conclusion.
Many people have loved this book, but I did not find it very appealing or satisfying.
C.A.Wulff - author of Born Without a Tail
Not heartwarming... in a good way. Before reading this book, I very much thought from the title (and because at the time I did not know who David Sedaris is)that it would be a "heart wrenching tale" about some child who is physically unable to speak or doesn't have access to a decent education. It was one of those books I meant to get to someday, but probably never would. Finally someone clued me in. I read it in a day.
Sedaris's short stories are the funniest I've ever read. He draws on recollections of his own family to give us realistic visions of family and personal life in all their "rolling on the floor laughing" complexity. If I were ever to write a book, this is exactly like what I hope I would write.
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