Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, the latest collection of humorous essays by David Sedaris, should win back all of the author’s fans who didn’t like his foray into fables, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.
Read by the author, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls has 20 essays in all, some of which were previously recorded in front of an audience. Some of the essays appeared in print in The New Yorker magazine and maybe elsewhere, but they really do seem funnier when the author reads them in his dryly knowing, who-me? voice.
As a humorist, David Sedaris has a definite liberal bias, but politics is very rarely the subject of an essay, except as it relates to health care, President Barack Obama, and marriage laws. These are subjects in the titles of some of the essays, but the subjects of most of the essays are the author’s own experiences, or as they would be if they had all taken place on days when everything struck him as being highly significant or indicative of a universal truth, while being, at the same time, extremely annoying.
In Obama!!!!! the author, an American living in England with his partner Hugh, describes the experience of traveling in Europe after the 2008 election of President Obama and hearing “Obama!!!!” from everyone he meets, including shop clerks and waiters. At first, he doesn’t mind being constantly congratulated on his country’s behavior, and smiles along at the constant cry of “Obama!!!!!”, but after a while, he starts to tire of the implication that underlies the surprise and pride that Europeans keep expressing to him – that America, as a country, had been thought too immature, too ignorant, and too racist to elect a black president, but look! they did it!
At the end of the book, after the 20 essays, the author includes six monologues that are ostensibly there for teens to perform in their forensics competitions in school, which he included, he says, because he had learned that teens have been using his work to read in front of panels of judges for these competitions. In each of the six monologues, he takes on a different persona, each one more offensive than the last. So these missed the mark for me as comedy, but maybe I took them too seriously.
This collection has several essays dealing with aging, travel, learning foreign languages, doing book tours, and living abroad. It also includes a special addition to the audio edition of Pimsleur phrases in Japanese that were not taught on the Pimsleur language learning CDs.
If you’ve enjoyed other David Sedaris audiobook collections in the past, you will probably enjoy this one. If not, probably not. If you’ve never listened to any before, I would recommend starting with one of the earlier collections, maybe Holidays on Ice or Naked, to get a feel for his humor and the personality he takes on in his essays (which I assume is a more highly concentrated version of his own actual personality).
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls
Sedaris, David
Narrated by the author
Hachette Audio
April 2013
9781619696990
$29.98 US/$32.98 CAN
7 hours on 6 CDs
Disclosure: I borrowed this audiobook from the public library.
This review is linked up to Sound Bytes, a weekly link-up of audiobook reviews at Devourer of Books.
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