Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
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Book Reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day
Book Review: Somebody help me....my sides have split open!
Summary: 5 Stars
OH MY GOD...that has to unquestionably be the most amusing book ever to be written by an actual member of our own species! How can such a man exist?! Sedaris is filled with a sense of humor and wit that cannot possibly be exaggerated. He has lived life in the most twistedly fantastic of senses and brings out the best of himself and everyone who reads this book. He understands something from each and every one of us and does not care what opinions he induces from people; he'll do his damn well best to write about those things people know about but don't sometimes say while baring his life and soul to us. This is a spectacularily unexpurgated edition of the book of not just his life, but ours, and it's wonderful. He makes his experiences on Speed one of the most splendid events I could ever imagine going through: "`I'm thinking of parceling off portions of my brain,` I once told her. `I'm not talking about having anything surgically removed, I'd just like to divide it into lots and lease it out so that people can say `I've got a house in Raleigh, a cottage in Myrtle Beach, and a little hideaway inside a visionary's head.` Her bored expression suggested the questionable value of my mental real estate."
Sedaris is not only a master at self-deprecating humor but he manages to strip his family of their protection and cover of normalcy as well whilst successfully expressing their mutual bonds as a clearly deep and affectionate family who warms your heart: "My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the dining-room table. 'It's non-traditional, but that's Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.'" It's this funny, ALL THE WAY, people. Articulate, brutally honest, and blatantly hilarious, you'll find no better. The review done by Amazon.com really helps in describing what this book will give you as well. You really can't go wrong. Reap the benefits and GET IT!!!
Book Review: Me tAlK PRettY ONe DAY
Summary: 5 Stars
"I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus," Says David Sedaris, "talking pretty" in his book, Me tAlK PRettY ONe DAY. (page 173) The quote above is from a story about the absurdities of taking French lessons. The book is a collection of funny memoirs about such awful experiences as speech therapy in elementary school, his father forcing him to take guitar lessons from a midget and moving to France and not being able to speak French. Most of the stories center around his bizarre siblings and parents, including his obsessively swearing brother Paul, his alcoholic, chain-smoking mom and his drama-obsessed sister Amy. As the book progresses the stories take place later in his life and follow him into adulthood. We see him growing older but still being the same timid, disturbed outsider. While this book is not part of a series, David Sedaris has written many other humor books like it, such as Naked, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice.
I think this book is extremely well written and hilarious. It wasn't only the events in the book that cracked me up, but the way he wrote them. His style is very subtle and his jokes sneak up on you. For instance, in the story, "Go Carolina," when he is trying to keep his speech therapist from hearing his lisp he desperately avoids using the letter S. "On the final day of the year we take down the pine tree in our living room and eat marine life,"
he says, to avoid saying "New Years," "Christmas" or "sea food." (page 14) I listened to part of the book in audio form and it is great to hear him read it because of his calm way of telling the jokes and the way he impersonates his characters.
David Sedaris grew in Raleigh, North Carolina with his five siblings. He later lived in New York City and now lives in France with his boyfriend. These provide the settings and material for many of his stories. The only people I would not recommend this book to are little kids or people who are easily offended by language because it contains obscenities. If you like comedy, have ever felt like an outsider or just want to know how not to speak French well, then read this book.
Book Review: Me laugh pretty one day
Summary: 5 Stars
David Sedaris is a comical genius! His books of essasys `Me Talk Pretty One Day' is one of the funniest things I've ever read. And not only is it funny, but it is also very witty. His text is so good that you don't want to put it down, because you know that in the next page there will be more laughing coming for you. Moreover, his comments about life, family and being a foreigner are very pertinent and never silly. There `characters' --real life people who are related to Sedaris-- are so good that you may believe they were made up, but on the other hand, we know that there are every kind of people around, so the people in the book they do exist. My favorites are his sister Amy, Bonnie(this woman deserves a whole book about her!!), his brother Paul, aka The Rooster (and believe me You Can't Kill the Rooster!). I believe that all these people should be flatered on being in Sedaris's book, because he writes about them with such a passion, that even when he is making fun of them it is impossible to be angry with him.
It is hard to choose one favorite essay because they are all so good, but there are a couple of them that can be pointed out as even better. My favorites are `Picka Pocketoni' (you have to read to find out what it is!), Go Carolina, The Learning Curve, The City of Light in the Dark and Jesus Shaves. But above all, the essay title Me Talk Pretty One Day is close to perfection. Anyone who has taken a single class of a foreigner language will easily identify him/herself to the story. Everything is there: the student who can understand everything but the most important word in the sentence and is afraid of having to talk, the native teacher to whom everything is obvious, the student who knows `everything' and is only taking classes to polish his/her language --but, as a matter of fact he/she wants to snob the other ones who know less than him/her-- etc.
My suggestion is: after a hard day, find a confortable armchair, open this book, and have non-stop laughs. And if you read this book and don't laugh, please, go to the doctor, you must have serious problems. Enjoy it! And Congratulations, Sedaris. I'm looking forward to reading more of his writings.
Book Review: Very funny, but don't read it all at once
Summary: 4 Stars
David Sedaris writes humour of the New Yorker, and does so very successfully. I read one of his articles about a fellow airline passenger who was weeping due to a recent bereavement. Sederis, initially sympathetic, reminisced about his own past bereavements - mainly broken hearts - and how he had used them to assume a sympathetic persona. He concluded the article by thinking how his fellow passenger was just a tad overdoing the tears. It was quite a complex piece, done with pace and humour. I like it so much I bought this book.
It's a collection of pieces which I presume were articles published separately before. I committed my usual mistake, and read the book from cover to cover, so that by the end there was a certain staleness and sameness to the articles. However, in general, I think the first section - dealing with Sedaris' family and youth were very funny. His family is of Greek origin, his father, sister and brother seem odd enough to provide even a less gifted humourist with material Sederis himself in gay, and grew up with a lisp for which he went to speech therapy - the first story, about the Speech Therapist, is for me, the best in the book. He manages to poke fun at himself, at his parents for sending him, and he exacts revenge (after all these years) on the speech therapist herself; all while keeping the reader interested and on his side. Remarkable.
The second section of the book is a lot less interesting. He goes to France with his boyfriend, and has funny things to say about the French, about American's in France and about French language and culture. Even though the humourous tone is maintained, and he tries to be ironic about the `gee-whiz' nature of American's observing the French, I think he falls into his own trap here. A much better book on this is Adam Gopnick's (another New Yorker writer) `Paris to the Moon'.
Nonetheless, the book is well worth a read. The humour is sustained and there were several times I laughed out loud. If you can dip into and out of this book over time, I think it's very rewarding .
Book Review: Funniest Sedaris yet...
Summary: 5 Stars
Me Talk Pretty One Day is the 3rd book I've read by David Sedaris in short succession, and it's the best one thus far. Like Holidays on Ice and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, it's filled with the Sedaris trademark self-deprecating humor. But unlike the previous two books, it has much less of a dark-side. The 28 stories are almost divided in two. The first part of the book is dedicated to American living. The second half deals with his trying to survive as an American living in France.
The stories about France are the funniest of the bunch. The French think Sedaris represents all Americans, and they're quick to scold him that American's are prudes (during the Clinton impeachment) or that their tariffs are too high (when the price of American products goes up). The French are sometimes seen as aloof. "The French have decided to ignore our self-proclaimed superiority, and this is translated as arrogance. To my knowledge, they've never said that they're better than us; they've just never said that we're the best." Even more confusing is trying to figure out the French language. All nouns are assigned a sex, and it's often something that defies logic. "Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression," Niagara Falls, Georgia, Florida and New England are all feminine.
"Murder, toothache, and Rollerblade," sandwich, corn, string beans, the Grand Canyon, Montana, and Utah are all masculine. Sedaris gives up trying to figure them out, and just orders things in two or more. By using the plural, one uses the plural article rather than the article that reflects gender. This gets a bit expensive when Sedaris starts ordering two appliances, chickens, etc. It's also hard to store everything.
One funny story has Sedaris taking an IQ test with Mensa. He is crushed when he receives the results and discovers that he's not even close to being classified a genius. Still, I think that Sedaris is a keen observer of life and a brilliant writer. In the long run, I think those things are more important than IQ any day.