Book Notices | The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith / Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

Alexander McCall Smith, The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Amazon   This is the fifth book in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series. If you're this far along, you'll know what you're in for: occasional reflections on philosophy, music, and art packed around the twin scaffolds of Isabel's personal life and her ethical dilemma du jour. This time around there's a depressed, disgraced doctor she feels responsible for, and she does a wee bit of sleuthing to try to help him out. But mostly the book is about watching Isabel's life and relationships unfold. A gentle read, which is sometimes just what one needs.

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

Amazon   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 peoples' 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.