Yuck. This wasn’t funny at all. The humor and characters were just mean-spirited. I enjoy dark humor when it makes me laugh, but I didn’t laugh once.

I guess you might enjoy this if you like dead baby jokes and making fun of the less fortunate.

This was on my TBR for what seems like forever. Too bad. Not a Sedaris fan, that’s for sure.

Santaland Diaries was David Sedaris’ breakthrough piece, establishing his career. This hilarious, uber-snarky account of Sedaris’ time as an elf in Macy’s Department Store first aired on NPR in 1992. It was the perfect counterpoint to the saccharine-sweet schmaltz typical of the season. It was how I was first introduced to him. It is also the anchor of this short collection, what elevates the collection to a four star rating.

It’s not that the rest of the material here is bad (though a couple are rather shockingly dark). But most of the pieces are available in other collection — scavenged from their original homes to make up this special, all holiday offering. While several deal with Xmas, there’s one for Thanksgiving, one for Easter, and a couple for Halloween (as well as one general winter piece). It’s definitely a Holiday theme all the way through.

I much prefer Sedaris’ non fiction work to his fictional stories. He (and his family) are his best subjects, that just can’t be topped by fiction. Because of the theme, several pieces here are his fictional work. Not my favorites. But in addition to Santaland Diaries, Six to Eight Black Men and Let It Snow are first rate.

Two final things — this collection is snarky and often pitch dark — if that doesn’t fit your holiday spirit, move along. And most importantly, David Sedaris’ odd and unique voice is a vital part of his work — his pieces are written to be performed, not read. If you want to get the full Sedaris experience, make sure you get the audiobook (Sedaris narrates all his own work).

My mother was a little crazy.

She saw people looking through our windows, heard them whispering under our porch, spotted private family conversations in the newspaper, unexpectedly screamed profanity at people who looked suspicious (sometimes while we were in a restaurant or some other very public location), and thought the writing on trucks and other vehicles that passed us on the road were coded messages just for her. … It was a bit creepy.

My father didn’t help. Rather than acknowledging my mother was crazy (she had paranoid schizophrenia, which I didn’t know until my late teens), he said she was “nervous.” This verdict suggested her visions were normal, and to my young mind, validated the notion that there were indeed people peeking into the house. It made me rather skittish.

However, as a bright side to my mother’s fickle mental state, she was brilliant and often savagely funny when lucid. Form letters—letters sent at Christmas generally boasting of a family’s all-around success and wholesomeness—were targets of particular glee. My mother would read these saccharine missives with just the right amount of over-the-top chirpiness, and then would compose her own, much darker, Christmas form letter about our family. For example, “Last summer, mother was institutionalized again at Grover’s Sanitarium. It is a lovely tree-lined facility, and who can forget the shock treatments!? Whee!!!” We had a highly evolved sense of humor. However, even in her darkest moments, I doubt my mother could have matched David Sedaris’ send-up of form letters in his essay, “Season’s Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!!”

Humor has always been about pushing the envelope. How far can you stretch humor before it tips over the edge and becomes disturbing? There’s no clear answer. I had a friend once comment vigorously, “You think the movie Fargo is funny? That’s not a funny movie!” Well sorry. I think it is. But humor is also deeply idiosyncratic. In Sedaris’s mock form letter, and this is not much of a spoiler given that you know something truly amiss is going on with the Dunbar family early on, the baby grandson is found—lifeless—in the dryer, having died while in the washing machine (but mercifully and most certainly, our letter writer assures us, before the spin cycle)… It’s not an essay that would appeal to everyone.

I doubt few would debate the humor of Sedaris’ classic “Santaland Diaries” or “Jesus Shaves,” which also appears in his collection Me Speak Pretty One Day. Yesterday, I was trying to describe and then read a couple of short excerpts from the latter essay, when I found a YouTube clip of Sedaris reading the essay. Humor is wickedly difficult to write; you’re confined to prose to convey the pacing and intonation comedy requires. And then there’s Sedaris’ voice, slightly nasal, droll, and deliciously snarky. When my husband heard the essay, read by Sedaris, he laughed so hard he had tears running down his cheeks.

“The Cow and the Turkey” is another wonderfully funny essay, slightly reminiscent of James Thurber’s wild fables. There’s no way to convey its humor adequately. Just think of a barnyard, the problems being a Secret Santa might pose for the animals, and a very sinister cow. My mother was that cow, and yes, Moira, I know this has Faulknerian echoes:

“My mother is a fish.”

I feel weird reviewing this book right now because the honest truth is: I really genuinely did not like it. And yet I’ve been called out recently by a bunch of helpful strangers on Goodreads for not liking their favorite books—this asshole telling me I should avoid all literary fiction, this one here saying that my problem is with fiction in general—and I fear I’m going to develop a reputation for hating books, and then Otis will kick me off Goodreads and all the mean girls in the Feedback Group will cheer and the only people who will care are the one hundred sixty-four people in my friends list, but then a huge chunk of those people are real-life friends who have only ever logged into Goodreads once, so in the end there are about five people who will care. Maybe six.

And that’s not to mention some of these other pressing fears a reviewer has to deal with: what if I rate too many books lowly (will people think I’m just trying to stir the pot and call negative attention to myself?), or what if I rate too many books highly (will people think I’m indiscriminate about which books are my favorites and therefore consider me unreliable?). I suppose there’s also the potential for too many mediocre reviews, and I guess that’s the guy whom everybody thinks can’t make up his freaking mind.

In the end, I’m going to just opt for honesty. I disliked this David Sedaris book. I have never read a David Sedaris book before but I understand him to be a very popular comedian and I usually enjoy very popular comedians. Except this book isn’t funny. The initial story around which the entire collection is based, “SantaLand Diaries,” is about Sedaris’s stint as a Christmas elf at a Macy’s department store. The observations of his boss, of the other elves, of parents and children waiting to see Santa, and of the other shoppers are pretty standard fare—there is nothing particularly noteworthy about his comments that made me laugh or even raise an eyebrow in amusement. Of his other stories, there is really only one that is mildly memorable; the rest rely heavily on shock value which is not something that can successfully stand on its own in my opinion. Having said that, I don’t know that I will give up on Sedaris altogether. This book seems sort of thrown together, most of the stories not relating to anything in particular, whether to each other or to any unified theme, but I would expect some of his other collections to have better focus, and I will retain his other books in my “to read” list based on that expectation.

I had trouble getting past the racism, ableism, and xenophobia that seemed to be the punchline of every joke.

There is something so very, very wrong with David Sedaris. I love him so much! I'm tickled that his book is what made me meet my 2018 reading challenge!

This was a book filled with 6 different stories, they were funny, but some of them were a little lame...

I listened to this as an audiobook and David Sedaris actually read the book, which was both parts entertaining and annoying. His voice is high and slightly annoying to listen to.

Not sure if I would do another audiobook by him... :/

I always enjoy David Sedaris and this was a fun and entertaining listen. I enjoy reading Sedaris' books, but listening to him makes it so much better.

Not Sedaris’ best.

Such an irreverent and awesome way to spend your Christmas drive. We spent many hours in the car this year, and this made us giggle for 4.5 of them.

a re-listen for the holidays. santaland diaries is just... so good.

DNF @57%

I love David Sedaris but I was disappointed overall with this novel because it was not what I expected. I thought the entirety of the novel would be whimsical autobiographical short stories but in the end it was a mix of true stories and fictional short stories.

I checked this out from the library and decided to read one short story leading up to Christmas and yet I had no deserve to continue it once I finished this ridiculous and sad story. Overall I guarantee you that everyone else will probably enjoy this book especially for his sarcasm but just know that its mostly fictional with some elements of autobiographical.

One of my favorite stories was David Sedaris experience as an Elf for Santaland at Macy's because you get major insight into how awful parents can be during the holidays with their children. I have to give a round of applause for everyone who has to work in any field dealing with children and parents because sometimes the parents are 100x worst than the children.

I debated for a long time whether I should finish this book or call it quits and since we are in a brand new year I want to start fresh and read books that I am interested about instead suffering through one novel for days only to have further disappointment by the time I complete it.