David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

I've finally gotten around to reading the copy of David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day that's been weighing down my shelves since—not an exaggeration—May of 2004. It's a collection of 29 essays about Sedaris' life that anyone reading this has probably already read at some point in the last 17 years. The praise for the book in the praise-for-this-book section suggests that the stories are "hilarious"—"wildly," "dangerously," even "blisteringly" funny. I don't know about that. I did laugh aloud once, at a line in one of the shortest stories in the book, "Big Boy," about the author's encounter with alien feces while using the bathroom at a dinner party. And Sedaris' essay about his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, in "A Shiner Like a Diamond" was interesting in displaying how people's passions can reveal themselves early. When I was a kid, I pretended my little glass dogs ran a newspaper. Amy Sedaris, meanwhile, was studying her teachers' mannerisms and stockpiling wigs. So, not laugh-out-loud funny, for the most part, but competently written little windows into the author's life that left me feeling well inclined toward him.