Rakoff, David. Don't Get Too Comfortable. New York: Doubleday, 2005.

David is a humorous essayist whose work initially appeared on This American Life. He's also gay. His name isn't Sedaris. He's like Sedaris but with reportage. He's Sedaris in the field.

He's also an incredible prose stylist. Look at this sentence (the second, that is, which I think needs set up by the first):

The general New York Times reader enjoys the privileges and plentitude of life in the world's wealthiest country, so articles on rolling cigarettes out of pocket lint or recipes on salvaging that last bit of rotting pork would make no sense. But is it completely naive to think that a squib in the same newspaper about ice cubes frozen from a river in the Scottish Highlands and overnighted to your doorstep—the perfect complement to your single malt—necessarily demands, if for no other reason than to preserve some vague notion of karmic balance, either a great big "April Fools!" scrawled across the top, or a prefatory note of apology that such a service even exists?" (24)

Why I like this sentence is that it's essentially a joke, a bit of humor that Rakoff doesn't toss off in the way most humorists would. It's the kind of joke you have to work for, delaying as it does the punchline for so long that one almost forgets one's been reading a question all the while.

There are downsides, though:

It was turning out to be an anxious Christmas season. Too many were the early mornings spent sitting at the table, insomniac in the gray dawn, thinking to myself [redundancy sic], Eggs would be good. Not for eating but for the viscous wrath of my ovo-barrage. It seemed only a matter of time before I was lobbing my edible artillery out the window at the army of malefactors who daily made my life such a buzzing carnival of annnoyance (188).

It goes on in this vein for another dozen lines or so, but I'll spare you the rest. Purple as hell, right? It's the exact kind of creative euphamism you get from thesaurus-happy high school students who've been told too early and too often that they're good writers. Snobbish of me to say, sure, but throughout this book I always wished Rakoff would move ten times faster through his flights of fancy and return to the weird and enthralling actual he's so good at uncovering.

One thing I learned reading this book, and was immediately encouraged to share with others and so will, is this quotation from Barbara Bush, our queen mum, on her son's decision to censor images of flag-draped coffins returning from his folly of a war. She said this on Good Morning America: "Why should we want to hear about body bags and deaths? I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

[C word.]