OverDrive would like to use cookies to store information on your computer to improve your user experience at our Website. One of the cookies we use is critical for certain aspects of the site to operate and has already been set. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but this could affect certain features or services of the site. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, click here to see our Privacy Policy.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Finalist for the Audie Award in Humor There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it.
If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There's a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.
These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harmless laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can't by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Finalist for the Audie Award in Humor There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it.
If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There's a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.
These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harmless laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can't by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
August 23, 2021 The celebrated humorist returns with more offhand observations on the weird and tiresome in these sparkling diary excerpts. Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day) riffs on life with his partner Hugh Hamrick as they brave awkward dinner parties; his obsession with picking up trash; the personal inconvenience of societal upheavals (“I was thinking of my beloved shops,” he frets during a 2020 looting outbreak—“What’ll happen if there’s nothing left for me to buy!”); and the colorful, quotable eccentrics who materialize everywhere he goes. (“On my way for a coffee this morning, I passed a man with an umbrella on his head... ‘The devil will fool you,’ he told me.”) The proceedings are saturated with Sedaris’s trademark irony, wherein the search for energizing squalor ends only in the purgatory of the banal. “I’d like to see angry orphans and drunk people fighting,” he notes at the start of a Bucharest sojourn, but at its conclusion he’s trapped on an airliner as “the woman in front of me shoved her seat all the way back and the woman next to her put on some horrible melon-scented hand cream. I couldn’t have been any more miserable.” They may not stick to your ribs, but Sedaris’s memoiristic nuggets are always tasty. Agent: Christina Concepcion, Don Congdon Assoc.
Sedaris's second collection of diary entries are more cosmopolitan and assured than his first collection, Theft by Finding, which covered 1977-2002. In spite of Sedaris's new financial security and his homes in Europe and the United States, the core of his personality and insecurity--which draws so many to his writing--remains. Sedaris is curious about the world, particularly its tawdry or ugly sides, and constantly aware of his role and complicity in that ugliness. His style of engagement means finding humor in nearly everything, often in ways that may elicit discomfort, though he is serious when it comes to tragedies such as mass shootings. For this reason, some will see his book as unsalvageable. Yet selected and edited as it is, his work is about radical vulnerability and reflects a universal experience of contending with one's internal life. "Who am I, how did I get to be this way, and what is wrong with me?" is a question Sedaris asks, and one worth asking. VERDICT Entertaining reading in itself, with references to some of the books he published in this era; a must-read for Sedaris's many fans.--Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.
Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
August 15, 2021 The second volume of diaries by Sedaris (after Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002), who navigates the early 21st century wealthier but still bemused. The flashpoints of the modern era--the Iraq War, Ferguson, Trump, Covid-19--pop up throughout these entries, but mainly so the author can sail past them with his usual irreverence. For example: "When the pandemic hit, my first thought wasn't Oh, those poor dying people but What about my airline status?" His bottomless capacity to make everything about him doesn't read as selfishness or ignorance, though; as with all good comics, the particulars of his life are stand-ins for everybody's foibles and frustrations. Traveling the world for readings, Sedaris takes note of every culture's peculiarities, from spitting on the street in Tokyo to offensive insults to language quirks--e.g., Tagalog is like "English on quaaludes." Sedaris treats his own life as a kind of foreign country, too. After moving from his longtime home in France to England, he began his hobby of picking up litter (documented in Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls), and the reactions of his neighbors, not to mention the trash itself, provide comic fodder. Family matters were trickier during this period: His troubled sister, Tiffany, killed herself, and his elderly but resilient father still treated him like a failure. Because Sedaris traveled all over the world during this stretch, the tone and form of the diaries shift; he's sometimes glib, sometimes contemplative, sometimes content just to catalog funny stuff he overhears. So for better or worse, he's a humorist who'll go anywhere. This book contains one of the best jokes about the Crucifixion you're likely to hear, along with a few subpar quips: "To honor the death of Marcel Marceau I observed a minute of silence." A rich trove for hardcore Sedaris fans, though no more personally revealing than his well-shaped essays.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
September 1, 2021 Surely Sedaris has shared enough of his life in his audaciously funny and poignant essays, showcased in his first selected collection, The Best of Me (2020). Not so! His judiciously edited diaries, beginning with Theft by Finding: Diaries, 1977-2002 (2017) and continuing here, cast more light on his omnivorous curiosity, habit of vigilant observation, acid wit, and impishness. Mesmerizing and jolting, Sedaris recounts his seemingly perpetual world tour of literary performances with gleanings from his voracious eavesdropping and nervy chats with fellow passengers, drivers, and restaurant and hotel staff. Sedaris claims, "I just can't for the life of me figure out what to say to people," the instigation for the outrageously cheeky questions he asks fans who wait in hours-long lines to talk with him. Sedaris records his passions for collecting "rudeness stories" and picking up litter in his West Sussex environs, and how the latter effort inspires his community to dedicate a garbage truck to him. Sedaris' shrewdly sketched world travelogue, hilarious anecdotes, and frank reflections on loved ones, and life's myriad absurdities and cruelties major and minor, make for a delectably sardonic, rueful, and provocative chronicle.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Sedaris' books are like a beloved, long-running sitcom; fans don't want to miss a word.
COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Title Information+
Publisher
Hachette Audio
OverDrive Listen
Release date:
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
Release date:
Digital Rights Information+
OverDrive MP3 Audiobook
Burn to CD:
Permitted
Transfer to device:
Permitted
Transfer to Apple® device:
Permitted
Public performance:
Not permitted
File-sharing:
Not permitted
Peer-to-peer usage:
Not permitted
All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed at the end of the lending period.
Please update to the latest version of the OverDrive app to stream videos.
Device Compatibility Notice
The OverDrive app is required for this format on your current device.
Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
You've reached your library's checkout limit for digital titles.
To make room for more checkouts, you may be able to return titles from your Checkouts page.
Excessive Checkout Limit Reached.
There have been too many titles checked out and returned by your account within a short period of time.
Try again in several days. If you are still not able to check out titles after 7 days, please contact Support.
You have already checked out this title. To access it, return to your Checkouts page.
This title is not available for your card type. If you think this is an error contact support.
There are no copies of this issue left to borrow. Please try to borrow this title again when a new issue is released.
| Sign In
You will be prompted to sign into your library account on the next page.
If this is your first time selecting “Send to NOOK,” you will then be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
The first time you select “Send to NOOK,” you will be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
You can read periodicals on any NOOK tablet or in the free NOOK reading app for iOS, Android or Windows 8.