Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

I have a great deal of admiration for David Sedaris. I once went to a book signing he had at our college's bookstore. I went to a live taping of This American Life where he was a reader (although on closer inspection of my memory, I wonder if it was actually David Rakoff). 

    Parenthetical break: I used to do things when I lived in the Twin Cities.  That is all.

I think Sedaris is best in an audio format. I feel like I would LOVE this book if I had listened to the audiobook. Instead, as with most short story or essay collections, it is a book filled with hits and misses.  I would divide the book up into about four different types of writings: those of his misspent youth, his travels, his hobbies, and fiction.

I can't even with the fiction that Sedaris writes. It's meant to be sardonic and maybe even satirical, but it's never funny or clever. So let's just assume that I basically skimmed through those stories.

I particularly like it when Sedaris writes about the strange things that occupy his time and his mind. There's a story, "Understanding Understanding Owls," about how he decided that he wanted to buy his boyfriend Hugh a stuffed owl. What he meant by stuffed owl, however, was a real owl that had been though the taxidermy process.  This is apparently illegal in many places, including the United States and France.  However, in the UK, the rules are looser, particularly if the bird died naturally or the "stuffed bird" was an antique. This led Sedaris to a taxidermy shop to purchase an owl and hilarity ensued. What I liked about this story was the strangeness of the topic. Who would think about taxidermy as a gift item? Even if you really like owls, why is a formerly live one a good present for someone you love?  It's such a gem to read about someone who loves something deeply, even if that something is utterly incomprehensible to you.

"Rubbish" is about how when Sedaris moved to West Sussex, he noticed that there was litter everywhere.  "The center of life is a little food shop, and walking to it on that first December afternoon, I saw more litter than I had the entire fifteen years I spent in Normandy." (215)  Instead of just bitching about it, he went all Lady Bird Johnson on that shit and started spending hours a day picking up trash.  It's so endearing to think about what a change he undoubtedly made in that community by simply doing a simple task.  I always think I should take a bag for trash out when I walk the dog, but I never do. Maybe reading this will give me some motivation to do so.

Anyway, it's a mixed bag, as always with Sedaris. I think you should listen to it, if that's possible for you.  But, it's still a funny look at modern life and worth your time.

Well-Read Black Girl edited by Glory Edim

I write a lot. I write for my job - endless lectures, syllabuses, assignments in which the directions have to be crystal clear, emails to students, co-workers, and administrators, I write in a daily journal every night, and I write in this blog space that makes it seem like it's 2007 all over again. I write primarily for communication at my job. I write primarily as a record of my own life in my journal. I write here mostly to keep track of the books I read and how proud I am of my dog. 

But I'm not a writer. I don't feel like part of me is missing when I accidentally forget to write in my journal at night. I don't go around thinking original thoughts that I just have to have written down.  Words don't eke out of my fingertips onto the page, as if a magical fairy has entered my body.

No, I'm a reader.  I read the way other people watch television. I don't just sit down on the couch and randomly flip on the television. I sit down on the couch and reach for my book (and, if I can, the cat - it's so much cozier to read when you have a cat on your legs, isn't it?).  I think about "my" books all the time. I talk about them all the time.

When I first looked at Well-Read Black Girl, I assumed that this would be like eating my vegetables. I'd read about how this collection of black female authors struggled as children and I'd get my dose of white guilt and that would be that. But I was so wrong. Because these aren't the stories of systematic oppression and racism, these are stories about readers.  Sure, some of these women suffered serious injustices and they write about those injustices, but they write about them in the service of telling you how they played a role in the development of their identities as readers.  So even though I was a white girl growing up in a rural area in the northern United States, I felt seen in this book. Their stories weren't my story, of course, but their stories were stories of characters who resonated (one of them cited Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and I squealed so loudly my husband and the dog came to check on me), of places that spoke to them, and of being able to, if only for those hours while reading the pages, visit places more adventurous, safer, or more magical than the world in which you lived.

I read these books and learned so much about the importance of Toni Morrison and James Baldwin within black culture. I learned how much harder it is to be a black nerd than a white nerd (the scant list of sci-fi/fantasy books by black women authors was sad). I learned that we are all united in the hunt for that one book that leaves that lasting impression. 

The book also has a list of all the books mentioned in the book. I'm going to use that list as a rough sort of Introduction into Black Literature for myself over the coming books. So don't be surprised if all of a sudden I'm reading Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison and starting to spout off about how I just don't have time to read all these amazing books!