Jungle Rumble

Sedaris, David.  When you are engulfed in flames.  New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

Author of Me Talk Pretty Someday and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, David Sedaris, is back with a new book of essays.   And I believe this might be his best collection yet.  When You are Engulfed in Flamescovers such topics as David’s parents art collection, his maddening, spiteful (yet sympathic) neighbor, his purchasing a skeleton as a gift and his successful (thus far) attempt to quit smoking.  As always with Sedaris you have to read it to believe it.  My favorite passages that made me bust a gut are:

“When it came to decorating her home, my mother was nothing if not practical. She learned early on that children will destroy whatever you put in front of them, so for most of my youth our furniture was chosen for its durability rather than for its beauty. The one exception was the dining-room set, which my parents bought shortly after they were married. Should a guest eye the buffet for longer than a second, my mother would notice and jump in to prompt a compliment. “You like it?” she’d ask. “It’s Scandinavian!” This, we learned, was the name of a region—a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.”

AND, this one from the essay where he talks of working with a medical examiner:

“…after lunch I accompanied a female pathologist to a murder trial.  She had performed the victim’s autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution.  There were plenty of things that should have concerned me -the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets- but all I could concentrate on was the defendant’s mother, who’d come to court earing cutoff jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt.  It couldn’t have been easy for her, but still you had to wonder: what would she consider a dress-up occasion?”

Whenever I finish reading a Sedaris book, I am always left with the desire to have him as my uncle who would make Thanksgiving dinner all the more special.  Look for When You are Engulfed in Flames on our shelves in September when we return to school.  Happy reading this summer!