Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls
Ratings161
Average rating3.8
To get the most from all of David Sedaris' work, one must listen to him read it out loud. There is just no way to mentally insert the appropriate inflection or tempo when reading.
I highly recommend the audible version of this book. It's like having a good friend with you telling you about their life and experiences, the good bits and the not so good bits. It feels honest.
Maybe because I have a twisted sense of humour, or maybe because I can relate personally to many of his stories, I found most of them to be exceptionally funny. I found myself laughing out loud so often I was not able to listen to it in public, which is definitely the sign of a good book.
Pretty amusing, we did this on a trip. Got some good laughs
Audiobook was good
In lgbt+ reads because author is in that community!
A solid book from Sedaris. Still doesn't top “Me Talk Pretty One Day” but well worth the listen (which is the only way to read Sedaris in my opinion.)
This was definitely the book from Sedaris that made me laugh the most. I was thoroughly enjoying it and ready to give it 4 stars (I rated all of his other books 3 stars) but the last 10% of the book turned out to be pretty weak. Pretty much all the pieces in which he doesn't describe his life but invents a different persona are pretty bad. And so we stay at 3 stars. At least the weakest part of the book is all concentrated at the end...
There are some of Sedaris' trademark short stories in here about his childhood and family that I really enjoyed, but then there are a couple other stories that fell flat for me, usually when he talks about more recent events. Have funny things just stopped happening to him?
I don't like David Sedaris's work very much. It took me a long time – I've lost count of the books of his that I've read – to realize that. But I love his craft.
His essays are just so well structured. They're rigorous but approachable. I'm jealous of his ability here.
But I don't like his work because it always has an undercurrent of sadness to me. He blithely describes abuse of all sorts and cracks wise. He draws good lessons and insights from his tragic and bizarre experiences. But I just can't get past the fact that his dad is/was terribly abusive.
So, anyway. This is another of his books. It's well-written. It has a lot of things that gave me a chuckle. But it's also very sad.
Parts of this was hilarious! At times however, I did not fully enjoy the non sequiturs. Also I was not appreciative of the music at the end of some of the tracks, I felt that it was too much of a filler, sometimes playing for more than a minute. This may be because I was listening to this audiobook on my walking commute and not on a car stereo.
This one is on and off for me. I liked some of the stories, and I didn't quite get others.
All in all, is a good collection of essays and sketches if you like David Sedaris. I recommend Me Talk Pretty One Day higher than this one.
I loved everything that was about his real life, and hated everything that was fiction. It's easy enough to skip the fiction, and doing so made this a solid 4 star book for me.
I very much enjoyed listening to Sedaris tell me the stories himself, but he lost my interest with the forensics stories at the end. After the first story, the rest felt like filler.
I found this a little uneven. Some of the stories were hilarious and had me laughing out loud but others I found a bit tedious. So while I rated some of the stories as 4 or 5 stars, the presence of the less entertaining stories brought my overall rating down to 3 stars. Still it was a quick fun read.
So-so collection of Sedaris' stories. Most of which have been heard before in one form or another. I listened on CD - the best way to encounter a David Sedaris story. There are a few good laughs in there but long series of passages that are not as funny as previous material.
I often say that David Sedaris is hit-or-miss for me, and it's true, though anytime someone says that about anything they generally mean that it's mostly miss, and I'm no exception. I liked this one, though. Though Sedaris is often described as a humorist, I frequently find him depressing. There's a bit of that on display here too, but it was light as Sedaris goes and I laughed a fair bit while reading. If you ever like reading Sedaris, this is a good one.
Sometimes I just wish the BBC would ask him to reprise Alistair Cooke's “Letter from America”. Maybe a bit too Ssnarky but he does have the ability to make the driest topic entertaining.
If you're looking for a laugh, you can't ever go wrong with Sedaris. Some of the essays he chose to write in a different persona were not as laugh out loud funny as his autobiographical work, but they were still a pleasant read. As always, my favorite pieces deal with Sedaris's dad or with Sedaris acclimating to a new culture/language. Both are discussed in this book. Many thanks to my friend Emily for gifting this book to me - I needed the laughs :-D
Some funny moments, but overall I was disappointed. Sedaris sounds like a cranky old man in this collection, and he concludes with a few short fiction pieces that I never enjoy as much as his memoirs. Oh well.
