Calypso by David Sedaris

read by the author

If you’ve never heard David Sedaris read, go google Santaland Diaries right now. You want an excerpt of him on NPR. Go ahead. I’ll wait. 

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All right, now that you’ve listened, you’re starting to get the picture. Sedaris is a memoirist and a performer of his memoirs, which are written in short… anecdotes? They’re more structured than that. Stage performances? You do definitely want to hear him read his work, but it also works very well in print. Stories? They are definitely that, but also highly personal and, to say the least, quirky as hell. Also deeply, sometimes shockingly, funny. You’re never sure how much of them to actually believe.

The term I see bandied about is “semi-autobiographical essays.” Which seems accurate enough, if a little pedantic. He collects these semi-autobiographical essays into books every so often, and Calypso is one of those collections.

It’s a bit of a departure from a lot of his previous work, because he was writing these stories/memories/anecdotes at a time in his life when he was dealing with the death of two family members. It’s still funny, because he’s a man who can see the humor in literally anything, and make you see it, too--and be a little shocked at yourself for laughing.

What you’ll be laughing about in this collection is a series of family vacations at a beach house on the Carolina coast, haunted by bickering, badgering, the arrival of middle age, and both the specter and the reality of mortality. There are snapping turtles and book signings, transatlantic travel and family dinners. Sedaris writes in lovingly, gleefully unsparing detail about everyone’s quirks and faults, his own most of all.

If that idea makes you squeamish, or really, if you’re squeamish at all, you should probably skip this one. But if you can handle a little tumor humor and a lot of blatant (but never gratiutous) oversharing, dive in. If he can laugh at his life, and make us laugh at it too, maybe you can start seeing the ridiculousness in yours.

Oh. And if possible, listen to the audiobook version, which he reads himself.

Teen Angst? Naaah...: A Quasi-Autobiography: #tbt review

Smart-alec urban nerd Ned Vizzini (author of It's Kind of a Funny Story) wrote a lot of anecdotes about junior high and high school and got them published while he was under 18. This collection of marvelously self-deprecating pieces will feel familiar to anybody who has ever been a teenager.

Vizzini was a nerdy Magic-playing teenager in New York City in the 1990s, and wrote about it. A lot of those anecdotes got published, and they’re all here, from the day he first played Nintendo in middle school to getting into the best public school in NYC to coming home drunk for the very first time to falling in love. The sum total of his anecdotes is a thoughtful and eloquent memoir of an adolescence, told from the point of view of someone who was still there at the time.

These are engaging little vignettes that show the author’s progress from late childhood to late adolescence, somewhere between awkwardness and grace. This is a young man who is privileged to be white and smart and financially secure in a city where many teens are anything but; he’s well aware of this. At the same time, he has faced social and emotional handicaps that form the basis of his self-deprecating sense of humor. This is a very real account of life in the big city for a teenager who may not be exactly typical but who faces many of the same problems that other teens face.

Playground by 50 Cent: #tbt review

(Finished April 25, 2015)

Butterball is a 13-year-old playground bully who has just landed another kid in the hospital. And he's absolutely not interested in telling his therapist, an out-of-touch white lady, what happened and why. His mom has made him move to Long Island with her when all he wants to do is live in the City with his dad, nobody will leave him alone about his weight, and he pretty much has nothing to say to anybody. 

I started reading this book with almost literally no idea what to expect. I was being a good librarian and deliberately reading outside of my wheelhouse. When I walked over to the Young Adult section, this book happened to be displayed with its very eye-catching cover facing out. So I picked it up, read the teaser on the back, and decided to go for it.

It turned out to be completely engaging—at first because the narrator manages to be such a complete idiot and yet display this intriguingly sharp, dry sense of humor, and then because I wanted to know what had happened on that playground, and then because I needed to know why and what would become of him. Little drawings throughout gave me a sense of what Butterball's world looks like to him. This, and the richness, realness, and effortless-seeming naive charm of Butterball's narrative of his own life, kept me right there with him—when being a mom of a teenager, and a white lady of a certain age, might have tempted me to empathize more with his mom or with his therapist.

This is a quick read that reminds you what trauma can do to kids, what their resilience looks like from within, and that there is such a thing as redemption. Highly recommend.

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

read by Louise Brealey

I ended up keeping this book on my wish list for a really long time—close to a year, I think—because while initially it appealed to me, I started to have reservations about it and it got lower and lower on my list. Finally, though, I was in the mood for something a little nostalgic, even if it was British working-class crumbling-industrial-town nostalgia, after having gone through the end of the world with the Amish; so I went for it.

And actually it was really great. I’d say that Dolly totally reminded me of me at that age if it weren’t too embarrassing—oops, did I say that out loud? Of course, Dolly’s humiliations and triumphs are exaggerated in order to make them better reading. But it is, indeed, wonderfully amusing reading, especially her gleefully lusty enjoyment of life in general and of lust in particular. And her cultural touchstones—Blackadder, Blade Runner, and her blundering entry into the local Goth and indie music scenes—made my heart go pitter-pat.

Oh, and the reader was spot-on perfect. I can’t imagine this in anybody else’s voice.

In short: I am so glad I decided to read this book after all. I haven’t had so much fun cheering a character on in a long time.