Holidays on Ice

I disclose up front that I am a huge Sedaris fan. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" was one of the most acidly funny books I ever read, and his short story "The Santaland Diaries" is nothing less than a masterpiece. And, I do not expect Sedaris to be "funny." Much of his most elegant prose, especially about his family, is not. But I admit to being very disappointed in "When You Are Engulfed in Flames."

I cannot explain exactly why I was disappointed. It's not that the writing, overall, was bad. It was just not terribly interesting. And while I got the point of tales like his companion, Hugh, proving his love by treating a noisome boil, for example, the world-weary, catty observational humor and the high-strung emotionalism just largely fell flat this time, almost sounding contrived. And the last tale about quitting smoking in Tokyo was, in my opinion, a stream of consciousness nightmare. And overall, there is a gloom settled over these pages. Since this was Sedaris' "mid-life crisis" book, I cannot object to that overmuch, but the sometime artless joylessness made "Engulfed" a numbing chore.

But, the book has side-splitting and thoughtful gems, too. The tale of Mrs. Peacock, the smelly babysitter from hell, the external catheter called "The Stadium Pal," and a harrowing piece about the nature of guilt and shame when he befriends an old sex offender shunned by society are Sedaris at his vintage best. Funny, but always thought provoking.

So, on balance, half the book is wonderful, half less so. If you are a Sedaris fan, you will enjoy it, but be prepared for some odd forays that do not work well. If you are new to Sedaris, this is not the book for you. "Naked," "Barrel Fever," and "Me Talk Pretty One Day" are where your attention should be.

Recommended, but with noted reservations.

Avid readers of The New Yorker may be disappointed to find most of the stories here are reprints from past issues of the magazine. That's why it's a good thing that David Sedaris' essays hold up to repeated readings. The intentionally awkward title of the renowned humorist's latest collection of stories - 22 in total - comes from a list of fire escape instructions he found in his Japanese hotel room, a country to which he had traveled to stop smoking. His adventure is detailed in one of his more thoughtful accounts, "The Smoking Section", a near-novella at 83 pages. In typical form, Sedaris describes his addiction to candid zingers, but he becomes more contemplative once he does stop smoking and journeys to Tokyo to find his comic muse again, whether it's attending a language class, reading labels at the supermarket, or scraping the fecal matter off his shoe. The essay turns serious in Hiroshima where he visits the Peace Museum, which I agree is a tortuous exhibit to see for the visual devastation you see after the A-bomb hit the city. The net effect of his approach enhances the depth of his storytelling even if the laughs are not as forthcoming.

Aside from his smoke-enders story, some of the others run longer than the author's usual length. A good example is "That's Amore", a twenty-plus-page story he shares about a particularly cranky New York neighbor named Helen. There are laughs to be found, especially as he searches for her dentures in the shrubs below her window. However, he delves more deeply into the details of this surprising friendship rather than reaching for the next funny anecdote, and the story becomes more poignant than funny when the elderly Helen falls ill. A more familiar Sedaris can be found in "Solution to Saturday's Puzzle" in which he describes a flight to Raleigh on which he encounters a most difficult passenger who is the very definition of high maintenance. He makes a familiar situation purely his own, and as someone who regales in his acute observations of the human condition at its worst, Sedaris takes special delight in tormenting his fellow flyer no matter how inadvertently.

The rest of his essays are more typical of what we expect from Sedaris, running the gamut from his parents' efforts to become art collectors in "Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool" to life in the French countryside with his partner of nine years, set designer Hugh Hamrick. Hugh figures prominently in "Keeping Up", which exposes the author's innate haplessness in social situations and how he appreciates his partner even more as someone he truly cannot live without. I also particularly liked "Crybaby", a brief account of another airplane trip in which the author meets a grieving widower, watches a Chris Rock movie and is suddenly reminded of his own childhood forty years ago. Other episodes have him buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina, recalling a nasty babysitter named Mrs. Peacock who made children scratch her back with a plastic monkey hand; buying Hugh a human skeleton for Christmas, and responding to old people who don't act their age but still feel entitled to have his seat on the bus. Not as seamless or laugh-out-loud as Me Talk Pretty One Day, my personal favorite of his collections, this book shows a mellower Sedaris still good for a sharp quip but looking a little further past his next line.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames
David Sedaris
Those who are not familiar with David Sedaris and the type of literature he produces more often than not have a hard time warming up to the idea of reading a whole book of essays, which is how When You Are Engulfed In Flames (WYAEIF) is described by his publishers. When You Are Engulfed in Flames is David Sedaris' seventh book of collected essays and short stories that would be better marketed and received if it were described as autobiographical journal entries. Albeit the idea of reading a whole book of essays seems cold and unappealing to most readers Sedaris' humor and honesty lends warmth and readability to the essays found in WYAEIF.
Life has a tendency to be false and superficial so when an author writes with honesty it is readily identified and appreciated by most readers. Sedaris in WYAIEF is very honest, to the point of shocking. Embarrassing might be a better word to describe his essays than shocking, because they reveal aspects about his life that most of us would keep hidden, less we die from embarrassment and shame. From his essay about beating a fat polish kid in a swimming competition to the boil on his backside his work exudes a type of honesty that helps the reader identify with him and his awkwardness in this world. Although David Sedaris' experiences are unique to him they often remind readers of their own disasters and mishaps in their lives. Being able to get the reader to identify with the writer with his truth serum is a key to WYAEIF's success.
Where WYAEIF falters is in the absurdity of some of the essays and the flatness of some of the sections. Turning "minnows into whales" or the mundane into excitement is Sedaris' specialty, but he tends to take some essays too far. He is introspective and can see things in ways most of us do not, which makes him a great story teller but also can make some of his essays unbelievable. "April in Paris" an essay about spiders, becoming a spider person and taking his favorite spider to Paris with him is a prime example of how introspectiveness becomes absurdity. But even with all the absurdity and honesty that can be found in the pages of WYAEIF the book has sections that fall flat or drag on putting the reader to sleep. WYAEIF starts off quickly with honest confessions and absurd stories but turns just as quickly into the uninteresting and mundane.
When You Are Engulfed In Flames is not a book for just anyone, but those who take the time to read it will be richly rewarded with honesty and humor. Sedaris writes about his life with honesty, to the point of absurdity. He makes you laugh at him with his stories about his awkwardness in this world and in his relationship. Even when sections of the book dry up and go flat Sedaris can string you along with his story telling abilities. When You Are Engulfed in Flames is an excellent autobiographical story about David Sedaris' life and adventures in this world.

(This review was constructed from discussions held by the Super Cool Facebook Readers Club about David Sedaris' When You Are Engulfed In Flames by its administrator on 4/6/2011.)

At almost 400 reviews and counting, it may be impossible to add anything unique to readers' impressions of this book, but I'll try. It was lent to me by a close friend to read in-between my Vine reviewing duties and I thought I'd never get to it. But having ordered a few hard goods thru Vine instead of books the last few times, I was able to sneak it in my satchel and take it on my 2-week vacation without feeling a trace of guilt for leaving the other, less entertaining pulps at home. Sedaris is a favorite and I'd skip a meal if I had to in order to read a few chapters.

This particular book meanders for a short while then quickly centers on his personal quest to quit smoking. Accompanied by his patient partner, Hugh, they leave France and go to Japan on a "David-quits-smoking-vacation" of sorts. The writing is full of his classic sly touches and is one of the few TRULY laugh-out-loud books I've read in quite some time. I enjoyed his take on many of Japan's oddities and in a strange way it made me want to visit that country even more.

While it's not Sedaris at his over-the-top best, it's darn close. There are tidbits of his upbringing and half-mentions of his crafty circus-like family, but nothing like we've seen in the past. They are supporting cast with bit parts in this book, not lead actors. Mostly, I missed his cigarette-slinging mother with her late afternoon cocktail, dolling out dry sarcasm to whatever young David tried his best at. (Seriously, who wouldn't want a mother like that?) But I can't blame the guy, this is new territory and through Sedaris' eyes, it looks pretty good.

An entertaining read, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is more than worthy of the few bucks you'd have to shell out to get it, even used. As for the copy sitting next to my computer presently, my friend may have to steal it in order to get it back. Sorry Maria.

A few years back word got around that one of Sedaris' first books (Naked) was to be made into a film. The idea seemed impossible. "Naked" is a seemingly random group of short stories. Sporadic but polished diary entrees at best. There was no real story there. Matthew Brodrick was rumored to be attacked to the project and it seemed for a short time that it was actually going to happen, then things, I guess fell apart. Since "Naked" Sedaris has written several other books, "Me Talk Pretty One Day", "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim" and now "When You Are Engulfed in Flames".

The books all follow the same pattern, Sedaris takes notes and entries from his diary and/or life experience, seasons them with humor and slight exaggeration and then presents them as self-depreciating musing about his family, his world, and himself. They are like candy to read (his stories/observations often around a dozen pages or so long) and often bring forth a chuckle or two if not a full blown guffaw. The inherent problem however is that when Sedaris wrote "Naked" (fresh from the success he had with his masterpiece "Santaland Diaries) he seemed to have a gold mind of material or maybe it was that his style seemed so fresh and new; but now there seems to be few surprises. Not that familiarity breeds contempt, but perhaps it breeds a slight bit of boredom. Such excerpts from "...Flames", like "Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle" and "Of Mice and Men" are very funny and biting. Others seem to tread over to familiar territory. "The Smoking Section" (a far too long story about Sedaris quitting smoking in Japan) has us back in a classroom with our hero learning Japanese. Funny, but not unlike "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" when our hero was learning French. There are also more stories about his youth, his hard smoking colorful mother, the cranky father, his boyfriend Hugh. All are enjoyable but all are very familiar.

As I look back on this book as well as his others, the idea of a movie makes more sense now. With each book we get a little more nuance, a little more filler. As a whole the books reflect a sort of non-liner auto -biography and right now that's good enough for me; but it begs the question: Can a David Sedaris movie be made? Maybe if you mined all of his work. If Hollywood were to bite again, what's the worst that could happen? Perhaps it might give David more material for his next book.

A thoroughly entertaining collection of essays. I don't recall reading Sedaris before, although I am familiar with the titles of his previous collections. I really don't know why he's been under my radar, and I'm not going to let him remain there any longer.

This collection intrigued me at first because of praise I had read for the longest piece, "The Smoking Section," in which Sedaris describes the end of his decades-long cigarette-loving addiction. It is a really well done essay, funny and true. Since he and his partner, Hugh, go to Japan as a place to quit the `cancer stick,' it's also an essay full of garbled Japanese-to-English translations, and the fun of Sedaris' realization that he is the absolute worst student in his Japanese class. My only (selfish) wish is that he had picked up a smoke at the end and rejoined the outcasts.

I laughed out loud in several places, and my favorite essay is "Town and Country," in which Sedaris is shocked at the vocabulary he hears from a well-heeled older couple on a plane, and then equally dismayed by a conversation he has with a cabbie in New York. Another little gem is "Old Faithful," the tale of a boil that grows on Sedaris' tailbone, and the ministrations of the faithful Hugh. "Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle" is hilarious, as the author begins filling in his Times crossword puzzle with responses to the harpy he's seated next to on yet another flight. "Eighteen across: `Not impressed.' Eleven down: `Whore'."

"That's Amore" is a rather sweet essay about the crabby, feisty old lady who lived in the same apartment building with David and Hugh in the early 1990s. She's a real scrapper, bigoted and yet big-hearted, and the genuine affection between Helen and the two men is palpable and never cloying. I guess I'll be working backward, but it's on to "Dress your Family in Corduroy and Denim" for me.

I purchased this based on the reviews. I thought it would be a collection of humorous short stories. I was wrong, I have still not gotten the urge to chuckle for any of the stories...... A waste of money. Try reading Tim Cahill for some good adventurous short stories that WILL make you laugh.

David Sedaris' latest collection is well worth reading, or even better, listening to. I listened to When You are Engulfed in Flames as an audio-book, read by the author. Sedaris' deadpan delivery is priceless. Four of the stories in this collection are recorded live. These stories are among the best in the collection, but they are enhanced by a live audience (those pregnant pauses, the anticipation, and the delirious laughter that follows each punchline).

Sedaris' stories (or essays, as they are often referred to) are amusing, presumably real-life, anecdotes about the mundane. These are like the stories told by the funniest guy at a dinner party.

As with any collection of stories (or essays), some are better than others. When You are Engulfed in Flames actually gets off to a weak start, leading off with the least engaging story in the bunch (It's Catching). The second story (Keeping Up) is amusing enough, but I was starting to think about listening to something else at this point. The next few stories were quite a bit funnier (I particularly liked Road Trips and What I Learned). By this point I was hooked. The audio version really hits its stride with the live readings of In the Waiting Room, Solutions to Saturdays Puzzle, Memento Mori, and Town and Country. The remainder of the collection doesn't maintain the same quality but all are entertaining enough (Of Mice and Men is the highlight of the `back end'). The final story, Smoking Section, is by far the longest story in the collection (25% of the CD space) and unfortunately, it's an uneven effort. Smoking Section feels like raw material that hasn't been properly culled. There is enough material in the story to create 3 or 4 short essays (I especially enjoyed David's foray into the world of competitive swimming). As it is, it lacks focus and rambles on.

In Canada we have a much beloved story-teller named Stuart McLean who is virtually unknown outside the Great White North (we also watch a uniquely Canadian television show called Corner Gas and drink coffee at a place called Tim Horton's). David Sedaris is similar to McLean in that he tells amusing anecdotes' to the delight of many; however there is a distinct difference. McLean is strictly G rated entertainment; sentimental and charming. Sedaris, while not R rated, is delivering PG material. Readers and listeners should be prepared for coarse language, sexual content, and references to recreational drug use. Some may find Sedaris' humour to be a little caustic. (Although many of us like caustic humour)

All in all, this is a highly entertaining collection of stories. If you don't feel inclined to read them all, I suggest you consider picking up When You are Engulfed in Flames and reading Memento Mori, Solutions to Saturdays Puzzle, Town and Country, In the Waiting Room, What I Learned, Of Mice and Men, and Road Trips. If you have access to the audio version, I highly recommend it. These are stories that were meant to be read out loud.

Seven out of the twelve stories in this book have appeared in other books by Sedaris and are reprinted here. The reprinted stories are all his typical non-fiction, commentaries on his life. The other five stories are fiction, and while they are creatively written I don't find them as interesting as Sedaris' true accounts of his own life. The fiction stories are over-the-top ridiculous. They're not bad, just not what I'm used to and not what I expected.

Here are the stories:
"SantaLand Diaries" (from Barrel Fever)
"Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!" (fiction)
"Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol" (fiction)
"Based Upon a True Story" (fiction)
"Christmas Means Giving" (fiction)
"Dinah, the Christmas Whore" (from Naked)
"Jesus Shaves" (from Me Talk Pretty One Day)
"Us and Them" (from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
"Let It Snow" (from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
"Six to Eight Black Men" (from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim)
"The Monster Mash" (from When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
"The Cow and The Turkey" (fiction, new story for this edition)

If you want to read something really unusual from Sedaris, namely fiction, then check out this book. The non-fiction stories reprinted in this book are also very good with a couple of them being some of my favorites by Sedaris.

This is a new edition of this book. The original edition, which is a few bucks cheaper, only contains the first six stories, while this one has twelve.

I had never read anything by David Sedaris until a student
mentioned his latest book, WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN
FLAMES . . . she said it had been a big help to her when she
quit smoking . . . so because of my interest in that topic, I
immediately went out and got a copy--and am glad that I did.

Sedaris is an American humorist, author and radio contributor . . . he
has written several bestsellers, all of which have been collections
of his essays.

WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED concludes with a longish piece
about the author's attempts to quit smoking . . . that was what
I read first and doing so enabled me to develop a better understanding
of the smoker's mentality . . . in particular, this passage caught my
attention:

* When I look back on my many years of smoking, the only real regret
I have is all the litter I generated, all those hundreds of thousands
of butts crushed underfoot. I was always outraged when a driver
would empty his ashtray onto the asphalt. "What a pig!" I'd think. But
he only did in bulk what I did piecemeal. In a city you tell yourself
that someone will clean it up, someone who wouldn't have a job
unless you dropped that butt onto the sidewalk. In that respect
you're good, you're helping. Then too, it never felt like real litter,
like tossing down, say, a broken lightbulb. No one was going
to cut his foot on a cigarette butt, and because of its earthy
color it pretty much disappeared into the landscape, the way a
peanut shell might. This made it "organic" or "biodegradable" --one
of those words that meant "all right."

That made me think about why others never realized this fact . . . but then
again, maybe they will after reading this book.

Other parts had me laughing, such as when he talked about fashion:

* In 1976 my glasses were so big I could clean the lenses with
a squeegee. Not only were they huge, they were also green
with Playboy emblems embossed on the stems. Today these frames
sound ridiculous, but back then they were actually quite stylish. Time
is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses
for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass
you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem
with fashion. Though design may reach an apex, it never settles back
and calls it quits. Rather, it just keeps reaching, attempting to satisfy
our insatiable need to buy new stuff. Squinting is timeless, but so,
unfortunately, are the blinding headaches that often accompany it.

And then there was this observation that put a smile on my face:

* That's Business Elite for you. Spend eight thousand dollars on a ticket,
and if you want an extra thirteen cents' worth of ice cream, all you have
to do is ask. It's like buying a golf cart and having a few tees thrown in,
but still it works, "Golly," I say. "Thanks!"

As a result of reading WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED, I've become a
David Sedaris fan . . . I now look forward to reading future books by
him, but in the meantime, I plan to go back and read some of his
earlier stuff.

In an interview with David Sedaris on the book's website the interviewer asks Mr. Sedaris, "How do you describe yourself as an author to someone who has never read your books before?" Mr. Sedaris answers quite simply, "Do you know what narcissist means?"

I am one of these well-read individuals who have never read a David Sedaris book. I received When in Engulfed in Flames to review around my birthday and knew instinctively I was receiving a gift. I quickly learned two things about this gifted author's books. Number one: be careful about reading them in public because some of his essays will make you laugh out loud so hard you will embarrass yourself. Number two: you don't have to finish this book in one sitting. Savor the writing and read one every few days or simply at your own pace.

I did have to enlist a few friends who are David Sedaris junkies and get a quick update on his family and friends. I knew Amy Sedaris was his sister but didn't know that Hugh was his partner. My friend gave me a quick rundown of his family, where David has been living and a quick analysis of his mother and father. That was all I needed to be instantly hooked and part of an elite group of David Sedaris followers.

There were some essays I found tedious such as "That's Amore." This essay tells the story of the love/hate relationship between David and his elderly neighbor Helen. At 27 pages long, I found myself saying out loud, "I've heard enough." He is so quick witted you want to stop him before he gets unfunny.

The essay in his book that literally brought me to tears was, "The Understudy." Back in the day, parents would go out of town and leave their children with practically strangers. Nowadays we do FBI background checks before leaving a kid with a babysitter while we run to Target. Sedaris describes this experience of being left with a stranger while his parents were on vacation with such humor and absurdity you are left with the sensation of: did that really happen. Yes of course it did and that is why this book is so funny.

Armchair Interviews says: Sly and quiet humor you expect from Sedaris.

One of the funniest and most entertaining stories Sedaris has ever written is the first story in this book, "SantaLand Diaries," his story about working as an elf in a department store Christmas display. It turns out that it is actually borrowed from one of his other books, Barrel Fever. The second best story I would say is "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," which is borrowed from his book Naked. It's a story about an unfortunate woman who is friends with David's sister Lisa. Those are the only two nonfiction stories in this collection.

The other four stories are all fiction, and while they are creatively written I don't find them as interesting as Sedaris' true accounts of his own life. The fiction stories are over-the-top ridiculous. They're not bad, just not what I'm used to and not what I expected.

Here are the stories:
"SantaLand Diaries" (from Barrel Fever)
"Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!"
"Dinah, the Christmas Whore" (from Naked)
"Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol"
"Based Upon a True Story"
"Christmas Means Giving"

"Season's Greetings" is a seasonal letter written to friends and family, telling of the crazy events of the last year. "Front Row" is about attending childrens' Christmas plays, giving reviews of the actors, etc. "Based Upon a True Story" is about a man giving a Christmas speech from the pulpit, with an ulterior motive. "Christmas Means Giving" is about competitive and materialistic neighbors.

If you want to read something really unusual from Sedaris, namely fiction, then check out this book, otherwise buy one of his other books for his more typical fare.

Every day, we're exposed to dozens of situations that we find funny, sad, ironic, thought provoking, etc. David Sedaris is one of the few people who makes note of such situations and then can turn them into best-selling books. His latest, When You Are Engulfed in Flames successfully follows his usual format.

As with most of his books, Sedaris scatters his stories between his childhood, his young adulthood, and the present. There are stories about his childhood home, one of his first apartments, trying to make friends with a spider, fighting with people on airplanes, and trying to scare away birds with the faces on LP covers. But much of this book is about smoking (The Smoking Section). For anyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s where almost everyone smoked anywhere they liked, this will take you down memory lane. Only Sedaris can find the irony in our attitudes about cigarettes. "It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won't be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp it while shooting into the windows of a day care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message." Also, "It's safe to assume that by 2025, guns will be sold in vending machines, but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America." He's got a point! He also details (in humorous fashion) his battle to quit smoking.

I always look forward to Sedaris when I need a book that is entertaining. Also, when Sedaris pokes fun at himself (which he often does), I can often identify with his experiences. He has become one of those authors whose books I automatically read when they are published.

David Sedaris is a writer who appreciates the finer things in life. The finer things we either ignore or simply don't see on a day-to-day basis. Throw in a dripping glob of neuroses and an erudite air of resignation and you too can arrive at the astute observations he so dutifully illustrates in his latest book, When You are Engulfed in Flames.

I think of Sedaris as an unconventional connoisseur of sorts. From sweat angels to the acumen of easily procuring dishwashing jobs, Stadium Pals, flaming mice, husbandry for spiders named "Big Chief Tommy", confronting airplane irritants, and finally to "finishing" smoking while learning Japanese, his musings evoke a nostalgia for times and things past never yet experienced.

This particular collection of essays centers around movement. Specifically regarding travel, Sedaris shares his experiences either en route to or upon arrival of the multitude of destinations to which he's traveled, some foreign, some domestic, all bizarre. Whether it be Japan, Thailand, France, the West Coast, Chicago, North Carolina, New York or wherever-have-you, his stories are ironic in that they all focus not on his destination, but rather the inner processing of his immediate surroundings, most notably his melancholy paranoia and courageous cynicism. It's more about the people he meets and his subsequent detachment from the normal workings of the world, not just the places he visits. It is the journey apparently, not the destination that matters. Sedaris' latest book is sublimely resigned, a comforting read for when the good times are indeed literally killing you.

I've heard some great things about David Sedaris. I've seen some interviews with him that were painfully funny and I've been enjoying my audiobook of Barrel Fever, though I'm only one hour into the three hour book. This is a long way of saying that Holidays on Ice was the first book I've actually read by David Sedaris.

So did it live up to the hype? Well, it depends on which stories you're talking about. Santaland Diaries? Hilarious! Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family? Eh. Christmas Means Giving? Unbelievably funny.

Basically, Holidays on Ice is like any other story collection: some stories are better than others. Some had me laughing out loud multiple times, others had me impatient to get to the next story. What's unique about it is David Sedaris' sense of humor. He has that biting and witty character that makes you want to keep reading, yet you almost feel bad for laughing. (At times, you definitely feel bad for laughing - some of the things he say are so wrong. But so funny!)

Sedaris is definitely not for the easily offended. He sometimes uses crude humor. But the bottom line is that he really is very funny. Books don't make me laugh out loud very often, but Sedaris has me cracking up left and right. Like I said, not all the stories of all the same quality, but generally they are very funny. This holiday collection is great for any Sedaris fan, or for anyone who wants a short introduction to his work. Holidays on Ice is small and very easy to read, so if you are trying to decide whether you want to give his larger books a try, this is probably a good book to pick up!

A big thank you to Miriam @ Hachette for sending me this book to review!

Woo... just read some of the other reviews, and it looks like I liked this book more than the majority. Or at least, felt more strongly about it, since so many are just "mehs". I don't think this collection had as many strong, stand-out essays as his others. But I also think that Sedaris is best listened-to; his pacing sometimes doesn't translate to the page (or at least my head) and it certainly improves his work. Given that, I still thought this was a good collection that's worth reading, if only for "The Smoking Section," his diary of quitting smoking while staying in Japan, along with reflections on how he started smoking and what happens afterwards. It's a nice comparison to learning French in "Me Talk Pretty One Day." His essay on their awful neighbor, Helen, was another really good one. And there are several airplane/airport/hotel situations that you'll appreciate if travel much. Or if you've ever just really hated the person you had to sit next to. Or if you're a competitive cryer. Oh, and if you're dealing with mortality, refer to the chapter on the gift of a skeleton... I cannot remember titles for the life of me!

Overall, the collection seems to focus less on his siblings and parents and more on his life with Hugh. I was lucky to hear him read from these essays while they were still being published, and those memories sort of mixed with reading them. I keep drawing comparisons between his and Hugh's relationship and mine with my husband... it never comes out sounding right, but I see strange similarities. Now I just need to publish and make money selling books. :)

Okay, so back on track - this was a good book. It's not what I'd start on if I'd never read David Sedaris. But it's a good follow-up.

At 134 pages, Holidays on Ice is one of the shortest books I have read. But it has taken me about 4 months to finish it. No, it isn't that the book was boring, it was just that, well, at 134 pages, I found that I could put this book down and attack other, longer, books.

Contents:
SantaLand Diaries
Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!
Dinah, the Christmas Whore
Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol
Based Upon a True Story
Christmas Means Giving

"SantaLand Diaries" is worth the price of admission. This is David's diary of working as an Elf at Macy's SantaLand. Great inside look at working during the holidays at New York's Macy store. The other story that is a work of nonfiction is "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," where David talks about his sister's rescue of a woman during the holiday season. Extremely funny interaction at the Sedaris house, and David learns something about his family.

"Season's Greetings" is a very funny look at the tradition of sending out a letter to family friends recapping the year. A rather dysfunctional family, to be honest, and the ending has a nice twist. If you ever send out those letters, this letter is not one that you usually write. And that is what made it funny (and at times, laugh out loud funny). "Christmas Means Giving" gives a whole new meaning to the phrase. One-upmanship like you have never seen.

If you have kids, and you have attended the "Holiday Pageant," "Front Row..." is a nasty review of the children's pageant. But I guess that is what made this story so amusing - you may think it, but you would never say it. David lays it all out for you. Finally, "Based Upon a True Story," takes the whole reality TV/Made for TV genre to a new, lower, level. After reading those two stories, you realize that David can be dark and twisted.

I think that David is best when he writes about himself or his family. "SantaLand Diaries" and "Dinah" are the two best stories in the book, as he relates his own experiences for you. Reading this book during the Christmas season will bring a smile to your face and allow you to see the holidays in a whole new light.

David Sedaris's most recent book of essays is as weirdly satisfying as his earlier efforts. He still plays the neurotic, extremely shy ex-pat, living in Normandy with boyfriend Hugh, afraid of his own shadow but having the ability to ferret out the weird side of every human interaction. In this essays, he explores artistic pretensions -- his own and his parents'; the terror of getting lost; getting picked up by an aggressively-friendly trucker; his coming out; the delights and irritations of flying first class; the crazy yet lovable lady next door; a long reflection on his efforts to quit smoking and drugging. He also treats us to the strange side of human existence -- urine leg bags, how and whether to greet the neighborhood pedophile; his arachnophilia that went as far as delightedly hunting and feeding flies to a spider; shopping for a human skeleton; sex-talking with an overly-enthusiastic immigrant NYC cabbie. Sedaris has become an expert at untangling and comically expressing the simultaneity of his emotions. A weepy airplane passenger causes him to feel him irritation, compassion, embarrassment and self-pity. While the oddness of his public persona makes for comedy, his inner life leavens it with pathos and insight.

WYAEIF does not have the frantic edge of some of Sedaris's earlier works, but it is a hard book to put down. Some discomfort comes from wondering how much of his work is true, how much embellished and how much plain made up. Sedaris has more than enough material to have come from several lifetimes. Still, his wry voice and personal insights make him delightful to read, however much one feels like a voyeur perusing the wreckage of his life.

I loved When You are Engulfed in Flames and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Sedaris' wit, sarcasm and ironic outlook on life, friends and family made me a fan and I am now reading his back catalog. I picked up Holidays on Ice figuring it might be a tonic to the over commercialization of the Christmas Season. I was right and I was wrong.

The first story Santaland Diaries was exactly what I was looking for, a skewering of all the things wrong with the mad rush holiday shopping season. It was funny and witty and I knew I was in for a treat. Then I read the next story, which was Greetings to Our Friends and Family, a twisted look at the ubiquitous holiday letter, it was a little too dark and nasty for me. I moved on to Christmas Means Giving, a tale of keeping up with the neighbors that turns very grisly. Several of the stories I had read before in Flames and Corduroy, so that was a bit of a disappointment, I didn't realize all the stories weren't new.

One of the other more memorable stories was Dinah, the Christmas Whore which was quite funny and rather touching. Of course it was a story involving David's family, where I find his humor at its best. I also really enjoyed Jesus Saves, a hilarious story of David's French class where everyone of a different nationality tries to explain Easter. So overall this collection was very uneven and it actually took me a month to read this very slight book, because parts of it were just too dark and a little shocking.

I love David Sedaris. I love his writing - it's witty and amazingly observant. His commentary on daily life is brilliant and I'm quite certain that if we met in real life, we'd be best friends. It was because of this that I was interested in finally, after all these years, reading his Christmas collection Holidays on Ice. Sadly, in the end, I'm very torn with the book.

Some essays are hilarious, like "SantaLand Diaries" and "Dinah, the Christmas Whore." They share memories from his past Christmases worth mentioning (working as one of Santa's Elves at Macy's, having a prostitute join his family for Christmas). Some were published in other books of his, so I've already read them, such as "Let it Snow" and "Six to Eight Black Men" (which are both terrific, nonetheless). And then some (three to be exact) I really didn't care for. They were okay, sure, but not written in his usual style. Rather than being first person narratives, he assumed the role of someone else and wrote their story (a angered wife, a rich competitive man, a TV executive) I didn't care for those stories and found myself skimming the pages rather than indulging. When it got back to his voice, I was comfortable again.

The book didn't exactly get me into the holidays spirit, but it did bring out the jaded side of me. And that's just as good, right?

Like many other people, my introduction to David Sedaris was through "The Santaland Diaries," broadcast on NPR's "This American Life" (I think). Maybe it was Sedaris's down-on-his luck history, his brooding delivery, or Ira Glass's fabulous production, but the readings (and their musical segués) were masterpieces. They captured all the ironies of the Christmas holiday -- the humiliation of grown people wearing elf costumes to bring in a few bucks; the madness of parents force-feeding reluctant children into the gaping maw of Macy's Christmas machine; the delicious naughtiness of elves cavorting behind the snowy scenery; the stinginess of the retail business to its own employees.

Now that Sedaris has become successful, his readings have lost their desperate edginess. And without Glass's sure and sensitive production, they lose their aural appeal. I'd recommend reading these stories rather than listening to audio versions.

That said, "Holiday on Ice" has a few delights that make it worth a listen. "Santaland Diaries," still has a few moments that will have you shaking your head at the lunacy of the Christmas experience. The encounters between the physically and mentally disabled with all-too-human Santas is an exercise in pathos, if not hilarity. "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" is a classic Sedaris piece, whose innocuous beginning lurches without warning into a collision between David's wacked-out family and the bizarre Southern characters that populated Sedaris's youth. For an added treat, "Dinah" is voiced by Amy Sedaris, the author's talented sister.

Other pieces don't succeed as well as these. "Based Upon A True Story" has a creepy, big-city TV exec blackmailing a "hillbilly" Christmas church audience, but seems more mean than mirthful. "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol" -- in which a theater critic savages children's Christmas pageants -- misses the comic mark entirely. Others, like, "Season's Greeting To Our Friends and Family!" -- a loonily bitter Christmas letter from a suburban Mom hurled over the edge of sanity and civility by her husband's long-lost Vietnamese daughter -- fail to play the knife-edge that separates a piece that finds humor in discomfort from one that is plain discomfitting.

Since the publication of "Holidays on Ice," David Sedaris has proven himself as a writer of subtlety, humanity and wry humor. This uneven collection shows him on the way to discovering his voice.

Another hilarious collection of essays by David Sedaris. This was another book that I read aloud to my husband. A lot of this book had to be read in private though, and not around relatives. It's definitely adult reading and adult language!

The portraits he paints of every day people doing things that are absolutely crazy in a way that makes them seem mundane is his calling card and he does this to excellent effect in this new novel. Whether it's the woman that lives alone in an apartment building that acts like she runs the place (and really does), the crazy people he hitchhikes with in the early 70's, his parent's take on art, or the people he meets in his attempt to quit smoking in japan, it's all written with a humorous edge and a sarcastic wit that makes even the most outcast and odd palatable.

There were several parts where he seemed to go over the edge beyond funny into really being almost sad, pathetic, or even hateful. But, the rest of the book is so well written and his humor continues to be so endearing that you can't help forgiving it as you continue on.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames is an excellent, strange, but very well written series of comedic looks into David Sedaris' life and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to read some fun, short, true stories by NPR's funniest voice in comedy.

David Sedaris reminds me of two other American essayists who wrote with sly, self-deprecating humor: Robert Benchley and James Thurber. But Sedaris has a way of engaging a wide range of human emotions: disgust at the parasite boring out of one's skin, nostalgia for a past before one's own time, embarrassment at the truck driver's indecent proposal, stoicism in the struggle to quit smoking, etc.

Sedaris has a talent for making us laugh at him and through him at the larger absurdity of modern life. He's very matter of fact about being gay and being gay in a monogamous relationship. Like Benchley and Thurber, he indulges in "married" jokes. If he's a little bent, I think that's necessary for his form of mind-bending humor.

It's good to bend your mind a little. Otherwise it becomes inflexible.

I bought the book because I had heard Sedaris reading one of his essays on NPR. Some might think that the only thing better than reading it is listening to the author read it aloud. I'm not sure. Some of the subject matter seems too private. I liked being able to pick up the book and put it down. Like a determined seducer, Sedaris made me laugh every time. I think I'm in love with Hugh, too.

This year there are no shortage of Christmas books on this site or in your local book shop to fill you with all the images of the holiday season: snow crested fields, roaring fireplaces, carolers, holly and ivy- you get the picture. There are newcomers like Grisham's "Skipping Christmas" and Mary and Carol Higgins Clark's "He Sees You While You're Sleeping" and "The Mitford Snowmen". Booksellers pile them right next to classics like Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," "Twas the Night Before Christmas," "The Polar Express," and Dr. Seuess' "The Grinch that Stole Christmas". Just like the annual search for the perfect tree, the search for the perfect holiday book is no less daunting.
So while browsing for my holiday selection, I was directed to a small paperback volume in David Sedaris' "Holidays on Ice". It's been out for a few years, but I missed this one (after reading it, I think I missed it because the Christmas police must have ordered it off the shelves for fear of causing a national laughing epidemic). Forget the antisocial behavior of the Grinch, he's just an out of work elf compared to Sedaris. Nothing, absolutely nothing about Christmas is immune from the sarcasm and cynicism displayed in the collection of short stories that make up this small volume. After reading this book on my train ride to Rockefeller Center to watch the annual lighting of the Christmas tree, I don't think that I'll ever be the same. Imagine that Santa's `Ho, Ho, Ho' greeting is really his egg nog induced shout to a streetwalker; or that Macy's dresses ex-cons and thugs as its Christmas elves; ever receive a Christmas letter from a cousin inside the annual holiday card only to have him recount his indictment for murder and invite your family to his bail hearing; or what about a contest with the neighbors over who can donate more blood to show the spirit of giving. Like I said, I'll never be the same.
If you like to laugh and can appreciate the acerbic wit of someone whom must have gotten too much coal in his stocking as a child to come up with this collection of irreverences, then this one's for you.

I admit that this was the first book from Sedaris that I have read, and it prompted me to purchase more of his books. It was given to me by a close friend, and it completely got me hooked! The first chapter, was genius-something I feel almost anyone that has ever had a crappy job can relate to. Sedaris puts a funny twist on the words, making me wish that I had thought those words myself.

As far as wording, he is extremely creative, adding to his amazing thoughts. He makes you think, laugh out loud, and want to share it with other people as well. I remember over a year ago reading chapters out loud to my friends, and I even took this same book on the plane with me to Iraq (still here!) to take the edge off of leaving family and the long (16 hour!) plane ride.

I have since passed this book on to another friend that I felt needed a good laugh, and hopefully got him hooked as well.

To the people that are offended for some reason by this book: It is sarcasm. Not serious. The author is simply making light, using fantasy situations and wit. If you can't take a joke, then maybe this book isn't for you. If it bothers you, it is a simple concept to just not read it.

I have only one word for this book, Yuk!! I know it is supposed to be a satire but I found it disgusting and depressing. Sedaris will not be added to authors who's books I want to read. I found nothing remotely funny or entertaining. I did read the first two stories and then said, no more.

This book is a collection of essays about the interests and experiences of David Sedaris. He is a well travelled, intelligent, curious man. My favorite chapter is The Smoking Section. This is about the three months he spent living in Tokyo while trying to quit smoking, eating raw horse meat and struggling to learn the Japanese language. I also liked the chapter about his strange tastes in paintings and how his family shared his love of art while he was growing up. I also enjoyed the chapter where he talks about his fascination with giving names to spiders and keeping them as pets. He talks about some people that made an impression on him. He talks about a lazy baby sitter he had when he was young. I also enjoyed reading about about a crusty old woman named Helen who Sedaris lived with when he worked in New York as a house cleaner. She had a passion for Italian cooking. I liked reading about his interests in crossword puzzles and his fascination with how people die. He devotes a whole chapter about buying a skeleton for his boyfriend Hugh as a gift. This chapter is pretty funny. He spends a lot of time travelling on airplanes, so he talks about the people that he meets on them in several chapters. I like the chapter Crybaby where he talks about sitting next to a man on an airplane whose mother has just died. This chapter shows the compassionate side of the author. I really liked reading this book.

I have never laughed so hard in my life than when I listened to this. Seriously, whenever I'm having a bad day or I know something stressful is coming up, I listen to these essays. Sedaris takes weird stuff that happens in life and turns them into hilarious and insightful pieces that entertain and give a whole new look at the absurd situations life frequently contains.

It's hard to give a long review of this, because they're composed of non-fiction essays, so there isn't really a long plot line to critique or character development to discuss. I will just say that this collection will have you laughing out loud and will make you look differently at weird situations that arise in your own life.

I also highly recommend the audiobook version of this. Hearing the essays read in Sedaris's own voice with his intonations really sets the tone and adds to the comedy.

This is an updated collection which contains some previously-released works and some new stories. It was actually all new to me, as this was the first time I've ever read anything by author David Sedaris, although his reputation certainly preceded him. Overall, I definitely enjoyed his cynical, wry humor.

I think Sedaris was most successful here in his more autobiographical stories (I'm assuming that these were somewhat true yet highly embellished). The chronicle which opens the book, "Santaland Diaries," was by far my favorite; this is Sedaris's description of working as Santa's elf for a major department store during the holiday season. Some of the other true tales weave in favorite odd moments from Sedaris's childhood. The fictional stories, on the other hand, tend to be way over-the-top, with almost a surreal aspect to them. However, I thought that the best of these was "Seasons Greetings," about a holiday newsletter that truly tells all.

I would definitely recommend these stories for fans of Sedaris and lovers of off-beat Christmas stories. If you are in the latter group, you might also like Maeve Binchy's This Year It Will Be Different and another collection by various authors, The Worst Noel. Merry Christmas!

After reading one of his short essays for a class I thought I'd try a whole collection and given the season chose this book. The first essay had me laughing out loud and reading passages to my friends because they were just so hilarious. Then I got to the short stories and I quickly went from amused to NOPE. While well written attempts to drive home the sheer ridiculousness of the holiday season, the short stories are not only gruesome, they are also boring.

I was pretty disappointed overall because it starts off with a great essay that quickly devolves. When I complained to my professor he merely said that "Sometimes Sedaris tries too hard" and I would agree that this is the case with this particular collection.

Sort of a cross between an anti-Christmas card and a greatest hits package, Holidays On Ice makes a great introduction to Sedaris' biting wit or a reminder of why you loved him to begin with.
Of course, the centerpiece here is "The Santaland Diaries", the hilarious retelling of working at Macy's as an elf to the boorish and overbearing parents and spoiled children who come to visit Santa. Sedaris always seems to me to be blasting both the elite and corporate worlds at the same time he looks down his nose at those that he perceives as lower on the ladder than himself. But, all's fair in satire, right?
Three of the stories are printed here for the first time (three came from his first two collections), and the best is undoubtedly "Based Upon A True Story", in which a television producer attempts to bribe a church congregation to pressure a fellow parishioner to sign over her story to his network for a mini-series. The woman in question had surgically transplanted a kidney to her dying son with only a Bible, a barn, and rudimentary cutting instruments. Although the story is both funny and tasteless, Sedaris' opinions are scathing and clear.
This collection is so appealing because all of the fat has been trimmed away and we're left with a short collection of holiday themed stories from one of America's angriest satirists. If this hooks you, Sedaris' longer collections are just waiting for you to be horrified by them (and I mean that in the best possible way).

I love David Sedaris. I've read four of his books now and loved each one more than the last. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is my favorite, with When You Are Engulfed in Flames coming in a close second.

The stories are meandering at times, but hilarious. They go in directions you don't expect, which makes them all the funnier. The things Sedaris goes through and the way he describes them are what makes his writing so successful---where the rest of us might bemoan our circumstances or childhoods, he turns his painful memories into something we want to read.

Just One Gripe:
Some of the chapters drag in the middle a little.

The Best Thing About This Book:
The humor---Sedaris' books make me laugh out loud frequently and when I think back on parts of the book, I giggle, even months later.

I have always enjoyed David Sedaris' humor, and although I generally listen to his audio books (read by him), this time I picked up the printed version, just under 200 pages. The Holidays on Ice title was originally released in 1997. This 2008 release contains some of the same stories and several new ones as well. Featured are:

* Santa Land Diaries
* Seasons Greetings to our Family and Friends
* Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol
* Based Upon a True Story
* Christmas Means Giving
* Dinah, the Christmas Whore
* Jesus Shaves
* Us and Them
* Let it Snow
* Six to Eight Black Men
* The Monster Mash
* The Cow and the Turkey

One of the funniest for me was: "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" an essay describing the dysfunctional world of David Sedaris. He tells how his sister Lisa brought her friend Dinah home four days before Christmas. He describes the humorous way in which his family reacts to her, and the questions they ask her about her interesting life in prison and about her experiences as a prostitute.

Sarcasm and cynicism fill this collection of short stories. You will be laughing your way through each story. If you are looking for something to cheer you up during the stressful holiday times, pick up this little book. It would make a fun gift for your family and friends who might need some cheering up this holiday season as well.

Although I really did enjoy this book, I am still a bigger fan of the audio books read by this author. In fact, I'm in the process of listening to his latest book: When You are Engulfed in Flames right now, and it's terrific.

I don't know what it is about Sedaris' writing, but I've decided I want to pitch a tent in his frontal lobe and live the rest of my days as a disciple of his neuroses. "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" is another wicked collection of short stories that at times had me laughing to the point of broken capillaries. When I read the anecdote about his experience buying pot from a redneck living in a double wide with a girlfriend who referred to the remote control by the n-word, I thought my head was going to explode.
Now, to be fair, this book is not all comedy. In fact, of the books of his that I've read I would consider this one to be the most reflective, if not downright serious at times. The last chapters read far more like a journal than a hysterical composition of outrageous yarns. But on the whole I loved this volume and I continue to ADORE Sedaris. In a perfect world, he and his life partner, Hugh would open the antique doors of their country home in Normandy and say, "Welcome home, Tori. David here has sobered up but you're welcome to live with us and deplete his old stashes of drugs, cigarettes and liquor."

In "When You are Engulfed in Flames," as well as in "Naked," the first of David Sedaris's books I've read, I continually marveled how how he spun hilarity from the mundane. Although I laughed my socks off at bedtime reading two or three chapters an evening, I'd wake up the next day and not recall scarcely a thread. Unlike reading Augusten Burrough's memoir, Magical Thinking, in which some of Burrough's stories will live with me forever. I absolutely love Hugh -- I want a friend just like him. He's the best sidekick for Sedaris.

My biggest gripe about "When You are Engulfed in Flames" is that the entire section entitled, The Smoking Section, felt unequal, in terms of editing, humor, and enthusiasm, to the rest of the book. It felt like Sedaris needed another 80 pages to complete a book-length collection, so he took his I'm Trying to Quit Smoking journal and clipped it the other manuscript pages and shipped the lot off to his publisher hoping they wouldn't notice it didn't quite work. Other than that, it was an enjoyable (but not memorable) read.

Marie Estorge
author of STORKBITES: A MEMOIR
and CONFESSIONS OF A BI-POLAR MARDI GRAS QUEEN
[...]

Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris is the perfect Audiobook for this time of year. It's actually 12 short stories and most of them are about Christmas, but there are Halloween and Easter stories too. The Audiobook consists of 4 CDs, so it's about 4 hours long and the stories range in length from about 10 minutes to about an hour. This was ideal for me this time of year; I started listening to it while I was cooking Thanksgiving dinner and finished it in 3 or 4 more sittings. Since it's short stories, there was no picking up where you left off.

These stories are humorous, and some of them are laugh out loud funny. David Sedaris reads most of them and he has the perfect tone for the sarcasm and dry wit in the stories. My favorites are "SantaLand Diaries" and "Jesus Shaves". "SantaLand Diaries" is the true story of David's experiences working as an elf in Macy's SantaLand. "Jesus Shaves" tells the story of the bells delivering candy to French children for Easter. (I think this one struck a chord with me because we used to live in France.) Both of these stories made me laugh out loud. This Audiobook contains language that is not appropriate for children.

This book is laugh out loud funny. At one point some iced tea came up my nose. I'm not sure I could find any other author's obsessive examination of a spider habitat in his home as amusing as Sedaris' nor his ability to write a well over 50 page essay on his journey from smoker to former smoker to keep me intrigued beyond my belief. His bold and brutal honesty is part of what makes his writing so uniquely funny. This essay collection is a mix of stories about his youth and family as well as his later life in France. It's a nice balance compared to "Me Talk Pretty One Day" which focuses more on his later years. If you're in need for a good laugh, but also appreciate his often sweet observations on relationships, and spot on scrutiny of all things human, take the time to get a glimpse into Sedaris' clever wit through this book.

This book was really hard to review! How exactly do you explain 'I hated this book and couldn't stop reading it. You might like it, too!'

Personally, I did not like this book. Each time I put the book down, I swore I wouldn't read any further. His stories left me with an odd, indecipherable feeling; sort of disturbed and a little melancholy. Mostly I just felt sorry for the author, like he was a guy that couldn't quite get a break, always a bit of bad luck following him. But a few hours later, maybe the next day, I would find myself picking it up and reading on...until I would set it down again and so on. I couldn't bring myself to call it quits, I felt compelled to keep reading.

It was while writing this review that I pinpointed what kept me engaged in the book. Like it or not, David Sedaris weaves you into his stories in a way makes you almost certain you were there, too, like he's triggered a memory just about to drop off the radar of your mind. His style of writing was rich and realistic; I found myself identifying with the way he organized his thoughts and how he digested the circumstances of others around him.

I don't feel I've much useful information to offer about the book beyond what I described: his writing is great but the content is for you to decide!

Holidays on Ice: Stories was my first exposure to David Sedaris, and this collection of 6 holiday essays is the funniest book, ever. With Sedaris, nothing is sacred about the holidays. He lampoons working at Macy's as a Christmas elf, holiday newsletters, school pageants, and excessive gift giving. Some of his humor is side-splitting, tears rolling down your cheeks funny. SantaLand Dairies, about Sedaris working at Macy's in SantaLand is the funniest and the longest story of the bunch. How Sedaris kept himself sane while parading around as an elf will have you laughing out loud.

Other stories are written with a deeper, darker, more satirical wit. One story, Seasons Greetings to Our Friends and Family, was a little too morbid for my taste. But all the stories are good, and all of them make us realize how over-the-top our Christmas celebrations have become.

I listened to this book on CD, which made it even more enjoyable as it's read by the author. Simply reading the book will cheat you out of hearing Sedaris mimic Billie Holiday singing Away In A Manger.

So in addition to the three or four other Christmas "classics" that I enjoy reading each year, I now have a new one to add to my list.

While looking though the other reviews of this collection of essays, I have to admit that most reviewers seem to be leaving out an important aspect of this book. Yes, David Sedaris is an amazing author with the ability to turn minor day-to-day traumas into laugh-inducing tales, but he is also excellent at portraying the less-than-glamorous side of life into riveting, sometimes shocking tales that often make the reader reflect upon their on life experiences. I found that this collection is filled with more of the latter and less of the humerous essays, which isn't a bad thing. Granted, I will admit that I prefer the ones that make me laugh out loud, and there are a few of those in this book, but not as many as his others; this book seems to be more of a reflection on happenings that have shaped or touched the auther. While I have thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone looking for a good read, maybe a warning could be issued to some Sedaris fans that this collection is definitely on the heavier side and that this is not a book filled with laughs, though, of course, it does have it's moments!

this was my first Sedaris book and although not totally blown away, it was definitely entertaining and good fun. i listened to the audio version, which is narrated by Sedaris himself and although this is not an old book (pub. 2008), the dry sarcasm and tone of his voice was reminiscent of an older style of stand up comedy.

the book is written in short stories of various happenings in Sedaris's life, including babysitting experiences of his younger days, what it what like going public about being gay, his crazy neighbors (which i can completely relate to!) and a more recent effort to quit smoking. there were definite highs and lows in the stories, with some absolutely hysterical laugh out loud moments in between. some stories held my interest more than others, notably That's Amore and The Smoking Section, but regardless, it was worth the time spent and i would probably pick up another Sedaris book someday.

I'm a big David Sedaris fan, but I didn't love this book as much as some of the others. When I read "Barrel Fever" and "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," I found myself laughing out loud numerous times. In this book, there were a few stories that made me laugh out loud, but mostly I smiled or chuckled. Not a bad track record, of course, but just not as uproariously funny as others. My favorite stories were those that chronicled his interactions with other people--the one with him fighting with the woman who sat next to him on the plane (I did laugh out loud during this one); the story of Helen, who lived in the same apartment building he and Hugh did; the horrible babysitter, Mrs. Peacock; and the final story, which chronicled his attempt to quit smoking while living in Japan. Those new to David Sedaris, I would recommend you start with a different book so you truly appreciate his amazing sense of humor.

David Sedaris's biographical sketch of the holidays is a breath of fresh air for this season. So many funny situations with clever point of view. This is a fun for the holidays read, if you are tired of the syrupy heavy handed formula based Christmas books. So many funny characters, the best of which is the author's point of view. First heard excerpt on podcast This American Life. Like Mr Sedaris's other books, this is worth the read - and guarantees a grin!

This author's Greek Grandmother lived with his family when he was a child, and the poor thing had gas, especially it seemed, at the dinner table. Sedaris compares one of her emanations to starting up a chain saw. She wasn't embarrassed at all, but "nothing irritated [the author's father] quite like the sound of his children's happiness." He kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and when Grandma let loose and the kids couldn't contain their laughter, down came the spoon. The author can't remember how many times he was whacked on the head by that spoon.

I laughed until I cried and then started thinking about my reaction. What's so funny about an old woman's intestinal malfunctions and a child-beating father?

"Then would come another mighty rip..." and milk would spray out of the children's mouths and noses as they tried to keep from laughing, and down would come the spoon.

Okay, so the author's story reminded me of my own childhood with a gaseous brother and parents who were okay with corporal punishment (most parents were back in those days).

Many of this author's funny stories contain a hidden (or not-so-hidden) sting: his friendship with an old man who turned out to be a child molester; his descriptions of the hotels that still accepted smokers; or his efforts to finish ahead of a child with Down's Syndrome at swimming laps (the only lap-swimmer I can beat at our pool is an 85-year-old woman who uses a walker on dry land.)

I can't help comparing Sedaris to another one of my all-time-favorite humorists, Dave Barry. The latter is definitely more up-beat, and has alerted me to many of the humorous aspects of daily life, such as the observation that Donald Trump does indeed look like the World's Largest Cheeto. Sedaris, on the other hand finds humor in life's darker corners. I think of him as a scorpion on laughing gas. He reveals his scars and tells stories about them and I'm laughing before I realize that maybe I should be crying. Nevertheless, I'm hungry for more stories. "When You are Engulfed in Flames" is my first book by David Sedaris, but I'm on a quest to read everything I can find by him.

This author's Greek Grandmother lived with his family when he was a child, and the poor thing had gas, especially it seemed, at the dinner table. Sedaris compares one of her emanations to starting up a chain saw. She wasn't embarrassed at all, but "nothing irritated [the author's father] quite like the sound of his children's happiness." He kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and when Grandma let loose and the kids couldn't contain their laughter, down came the spoon. The author can't remember how many times he was whacked on the head by that spoon.

I laughed until I cried and then started thinking about my reaction. What's so funny about an old woman's intestinal malfunctions and a child-beating father?

"Then would come another mighty rip..." and milk would spray out of the children's mouths and noses as they tried to keep from laughing, and down would come the spoon.

Okay, so the author's story reminded me of my own childhood with a gaseous brother and parents who were okay with corporal punishment (most parents were back in those days).

Many of this author's funny stories contain a hidden (or not-so-hidden) sting: his friendship with an old man who turned out to be a child molester; his descriptions of the hotels that still accepted smokers; or his efforts to finish ahead of a child with Down's Syndrome at swimming laps (the only lap-swimmer I can beat at our pool is an 85-year-old woman who uses a walker on dry land.)

I can't help comparing Sedaris to another one of my all-time-favorite humorists, Dave Barry. The latter is definitely more up-beat, and has alerted me to many of the humorous aspects of daily life, such as the observation that Donald Trump does indeed look like the World's Largest Cheeto. Sedaris, on the other hand finds humor in life's darker corners. I think of him as a scorpion on laughing gas. He reveals his scars and tells stories about them and I'm laughing before I realize that maybe I should be crying. Nevertheless, I'm hungry for more stories. "When You are Engulfed in Flames" is my first book by David Sedaris, but I'm on a quest to read everything I can find by him.

To say that David Sedaris doesn't see the world the way that others do is a grievous understatement. He finds equal humor in the bizarre and the mundane. His wit can be both razor sharp and gentle as feather. He writes and says things that maybe you've thought about before and if you haven't thought about them before you'll certainly give them plenty of thought afterwords.
Sedaris gift for storytelling is on display at its finest in this audio collection of holiday-themed stories. The most famous is, of course, "The Santaland Diaries", in which Sedaris relates in hillarious detail his experiences working as an elf at Macy's Santaland in New York. This piece is an American classic which should be compulsory reading for anyone who has worked a retail job during the holidays, not to mention anyone who has ever shopped a store during the holidays. Almost as good is "Front Row Center WIth Thaddeus Bristol" which skewers both a pompous theater critic and the sometimes attrocious children's holiday plays he's reviewing.
In all, this collection contains six stories read by Sedaris himself, his sister Amy and actress Ann Magnuson. The different voices work well to set the tone for each story over the course of the tape, and the variety helps sustain interest which can be an issue with single reader audio programs.
For many of us, the holidays mean laughter and tears. David Dedaris understands this and has given the world six of the finest tools with which to cope.

This is the second book I've read by the author, with the other being _Naked_. As with his other work, _When You Are Engulfed in Flames_ is a collection of short vignettes, with each one being fairly independent of the other. Neither book is especially laugh-out-loud funny; rather, the humour is largely dry and somewhat absurd, with the narrator usually being in some surreal predicament (e.g. being the passenger in a big-rig truck where the driver detects his homosexuality and delivers suggestions of a sexual nature). However, unlike _Naked_, none of the stories are very compelling: there is no sense of adolescent growth, confusion, and personal danger. The last story on quitting smoking is unusual and interesting, but come on, who wants to read yet another story about a middle-age man trying to put down cigarettes?

All in all, the book is a good read if you like mildly-humourous stories.

Laugh at yourself and the whole world laughs with you. It's hard to write humorous essays that stand the test of time. Will Rogers realized that and just read the newspaper to audiences while adding an occasionally wry quip to get huge laughs. Put those messages into a book, and they wouldn't have lasted.

I haven't heard David Sedaris perform in person (which he does as readings), but I'm told he's marvelous. If you have had that pleasure, you will undoubtedly hear his voice, know his timing, and see his expressions as you read this witty, self-deprecating book. I suspect that such an imagined performance would easily turn this into a five-star book.

Proust waxed poetic about his memories of a madeleine (a shell-shaped cake in the France of his youth) in stream of consciousness prose. Sedaris does the same thing for a painful boil on his derriere, his horrible inability to learn new languages, and his desire to show a little more plumpness in his derriere. The results are equally memorable . . . but much more amusing in the case of Sedaris.

Sedaris likes to put together mosaics of seemingly unconnected memories that when combined show a different image and send a different message. It's a little like a Chuck Close portrait.

Like the best humorists, he takes us into her personal life . . . into the kinds of details that few of us would openly share with the public. In exchange for yielding his privacy, he helps us see ourselves in his experiences. Who hasn't struggled with a foreign language with embarrassing consequences? Who hasn't wanted to be a little more in some aspect of their lives? Who hasn't had trouble getting rid of a bad habit?

These themes and more are explored in well-written, interesting style that lacks only an overriding sense of meaning (other than that we are all a mess) to be important prose. Some of them are hilarious, breaking into images of burlesque skits in your mind. Others are more poignant than funny, using wry humor. But he mostly doesn't stretch; rather, he expresses who he is and how he sees life.

As a former smoker, former heavy drinker, former drug user, and current homosexual with a fascination for feeding spiders, some aspect of his life will intersect with yours. But at the same time, he has exotic tastes (spending a lot of time in Normandy, learning not to smoke in Tokyo, and traveling from city to city reading his essays while staying at the finest hotels) that will make his lens different than yours. You'll never see the world the same way, as Proust changed our perceptions of madeleines.

Is it worth the trip? Yes, but I advise small reading doses. It goes down more smoothly that way.

"...and being kicked by a donkey with socks on." Sharper and darker then other Sedaris books I've read, this one still kept my attention and had me laughing uncontrollably many times throughout the book. I love how he strikes incredibly awkward & painful moments against a quirky random line of thought. On the bow tie and what it says of the wearer: "Not that you're powerless, but that you're impotent... a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle." The section of tales on the monster of a landlady, Helen was a particular favorite. The power struggles of the powerless and the games they like to play with other people's lives. All as an illustration of just how useless and ineffectual she was as a person by her own choice and making. When Helen yells from her window at someone and loses her dentures in the shrubs below, Sedaris retrieves them and returns them. As soon as she has them back in place, she cusses up a blue streak. Sedaris notes: "She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries back into a particularly foul toy." Similar power struggles over airplane seats and the way people react when they don't get what they want when they want. "Seventeen across: a fifteen-letter word for enlightenment. 'I am not an a**h***,' I wrote, and it fit." I think my favorite section closes the book, the periodic journal - stream of conscious, at times like fortune cookie slips - which follows Sedaris's effort to give up cigarettes. This is the sort of writing, I enjoy the most. It felt like I was getting to read Sedaris's work, direct and almost unedited, work that hadn't been worked over several times for effect.

David Sedaris gives us a book on Christmas with a twist. This is not a book about how wonderfull Christmas is but how sick and screwed up the world is with Christmas as the backdrop. My personal favorite story is about working as an Elf with Santa at a department store for the holidays. The little vignettes within the story about the going ons in the Santa department is truly funny because it is true. I worked at a famous toy chain one year and the same stories happened to me. Not one of the stories is traditional, but written with a New York sense of humor. "Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol" is about a serious review of children's Cristmas pagents and is every bit as blistering as if they were a Broadway play. "Christmas Means Giving" is about one-up-man-ship of trying to keep up with the Joneses and is every bit as funny as it is sick. If you want a book with a warped sense of Christmas that is funny, this is for you. This is definitly not for children, but it is for their parents.

By now, David Sedaris is a household name for anyone who listens to "This American Life" on NPR or reads the New Yorker religiously. I first came upon the author when my cousin read me his SantaLand Diaries. Because I do not enjoy being read to aloud, I would look over her shoulder and silently read along (which turned out to be a bit ahead), and then wait for her to get to the punchlines so that I could laugh out loud at the correct moments. The laughing out loud wasn't hard to do, but the waiting for my cousin to get there was. It was the funniest thing I had read in a good long while. I have never heard "This American Life," but I have since read many of his essays, both in his previous works of collected essays and those that have been published in the New Yorker.

WHILE YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES is Sedaris's sixth book, and it opens with a bang but slowly loses steam until the long essay at the end. "The Smoking Session" chronicles his quest to stop smoking after his mother dies of lung cancer. It starts off in traditional essay fashion and then concludes with diary entries --- dates and all --- for each day he is in Tokyo kicking the habit. Perhaps because addiction is such a powerful and personal topic, this is the funniest, the most intimate and the most human of the essays here.

This is not to say that the others are devoid of humor, intimacy or humanness, for to lack such things would be completely un-Sedaris-like. But in "The Smoking Section," where he reminisces about previously quitting drugs and alcohol, along with the present cigarettes, he is back to being Sedaris at his finest. It is almost as if this small section is the book itself and the rest of the stories are filler --- good on their own but a bit tedious side by side in book format. This may be due to the fact that many were first published elsewhere, thus they lack thematic continuity.

These essays, however, are still worthy of merit. Those that originally appeared in the New Yorker are by far the best of that bunch, and the rest are interesting for anyone already familiar with Sedaris --- for each story is one more puzzle piece into the life of the man we feel we know. Taken as a whole, they bring comedy to everyday life and a narrative to everyday experiences. He writes of his family, his schooldays, his travels, his relationships, and all other phases of life both important and trivial --- and the trivial is made significant by its insight and irony. Sedaris kept journals before becoming a writer in the professional sense of the word, and he has truly turned his personal hobby into a unique literary endeavor that appears effortless and without fault.

In WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, like all previous works of his that I have read, his homosexuality doesn't come into play until the middle of the book. In this way he is a writer who just happens to be gay instead of a "Gay Writer." As a minority writer and an advocate for gay rights, I find it refreshing that his sexuality is treated no differently than that of anyone else. Sedaris writes of his life with his boyfriend Hugh and focuses as much on their day-to-day existence as a couple as on the fact that they are two males in love. He has his coming-out stories and his in-the-closet stories, but all these are treated as no more or no less important than everything else he writes about. The result is literature that can be read by gay males but is not written specifically for gay males, and this seems to create a sense of normalcy that homosexuals of both genders often lack in this hyper homo-aware generation, which is at once friendly and phobic.

Sedaris --- Greek, middle-class, gay, and with his own set of neuroses --- is an individual to whom we can all relate --- if not in specifics, at least in the sense of a self-conscious, second-guessing, blundering and selfish existence. He tries to be nothing other than what he is --- a human being. And for this we can't help but love him.

--- Reviewed by Shannon Luders-Manuel

David Sedaris is always hilarious and touching, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames was no exception. I listened to this on audiobook during my commute, and I was alternately laughing and tearing up on the highway! This wasn't my favorite Sedaris that I've ever read, but he's still better than most of what's out there, especially when you are listening to him on audio. He is one of my favorite narrators; his delivery is delightful. While I have purchased his audio versions of Holidays on Ice and Live at Carnegie Hall to listen to over and over again, this was one that I chose to borrow from the library and probably wouldn't purchase. I did enjoy it a lot, but I am pretty frugal (a Scroogey miser). If the price doesn't seem extravagant to you, I would say it's definitely worth it. If $25 seems like a bit much (hello, kindred spirit!) request this from your local library. You'll be glad you did.

While David Sedaris is still one of the premier essayists of this generation, his most recent book just didn't really do it for me, and I think he's in danger of kinda treading water a little bit. I mean, really, how many hilarious stories can he still have left to tell? I can remember reading 'Naked' and 'Me Talk Pretty...' and literally having to bite my tongue as tears streamed down my cheeks because I was laughing so hard (but laughing hysterically out loud for no apparent reason on the subway in New York tends to make people nervous!). This book, that didn't happen. There were a few funny stories, some good insightful moments, but I'm not sure that i'd pick up another Sedaris book. Might be time for him to try a new genre, he's a brilliant writer, but I'm just not sure how much of this kind of stuff he can keep pumping out. Still highly recommended, just start with 'Naked' or 'Me Talk Pretty...'

I really love him way too much for my own good. So I was so excited to pick up his latest book, and I truly was giggling through the first three chapters. He is just so crazy funny to me. I know that not everyone gets his humor, but I do. And I love it. He makes me want to download it and listen to him read it to me, because it's even more funny to hear him say what he's written. But as I got further through the book, it started to feel a bit forced, like he might be running out of material. Although, in some ways, he did feel more real in this book. There was more personal reflection than in his previous works, and I did like that. All in all, a mixed review (although I still will pick up anything and everything he writes). If you're a fan, read it. If you're a Sedaris first-timer, pick up Me Talk Pretty One Day and/or Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (and Holidays on Ice) first, and then come back to this one.

This a very funny - and at times, touching - collection of holiday-themed essays. The one about the time the author worked as a Christmas elf at the NYC Macy's is a classic. But you've been warned: this is not for the kids. It's not the Hallmark/Lifetime version of Christmas. It is wickedly funny and whip smart, but it won't be to everyone's taste.

I was in a funk and needed a good laugh.David Sedaris's book was just the thing to lift my mood. It's a series of anecdotes held together by the theme of smoking. David has a love-hate relationship with smoking and when he decides to quit its cold turkey in another country half-way around the world. My favorite story is about his jealous, spiteful neighbor who succumbs by falling off a chair while changing a lightbulb that David refused to change. Ouch.

"This afternoon I sat in the eighth-floor SantaLand office and was told, ` Congratulations, Mr. Sedaris. You are an elf.'" This is one of the many hilarious quotes from David Sedaris' novel Holidays on Ice which contains six enlightening Christmas stories. Also known for his other hilarious books Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, middle aged humorist Sedaris writes about his own experiences and thoughts on the Christmas season.
In the first essay entitled "SantaLand Diaries," Sedaris tells his about his crazy encounters working as an elf in the department store Macy's after getting rejected from UPS. He describes the shoppers and fellow employees with sarcastic humor. He tells about his various jobs that he works, and explains about the Magic Window position. He has to stand there and exclaim, "Step on the Magic Star and look through the window, and you can see Santa!" One day he gets bored of saying the same fifteen words over and over again, so he decides to mix things up a bit. "Step on the Magic Star and you can see Cher and Mike Tyson!" People start to get upset when they sacrifice their spot in line to see Santa to go into the Magic Star line. Needless to say, David Sedaris is never positioned in the Magic Star line again.
The next essay, "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!" is a fictional story about the ridiculousness of long family descriptions on Christmas cards. "He's made the honor roll every semester and there seems to be no stopping him!!! A year and a half left to go and already the job offers are pouring in! We love you, Kevin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" exclaims the narrator Mrs. Dunbar. Mrs. Dunbar's ideal world, however, soon comes crashing down when a stranger named Khe Sahn suddenly comes to live with them. As it turns out, Mrs. Dunbar's "perfect" husband had a daughter in Vietnam named Khe Sahn. As the story unfolds, Khe Sahn turns their world upside down.
"Dinah, the Christmas Whore" is another essay describing the bizarre world of David Sedaris. He tells how his sister Lisa brought her friend Dinah home one day four days before Christmas. He describes the humorous way in which his family reacts to her, and the questions they ask her about her interesting life in prison and about her experiences as a prostitute.
Another essay, "Christmas Means Giving," tells the fictional story about one family's competition with their neighbors, the Cottinghams. Every year, the neighbors try to out-do the other's Christmas deeds, and as you will see it gets pretty crazy as the families try to be the best and most "giving" in the neighborhood.
Holidays on Ice is a hilarious book of essays that will keep you laughing non-stop. I recommend this novel for anyone who wants a good laugh, young or old. I personally give this book two very enthusiastic thumbs up for its dry humor. Each sarcastic and humorous essay will make you want to read the next. By the way, this collection of essays would make a great Christmas gift!

Sometimes it feels as though ever since I first discovered David Sedaris, I spend the remaining time anxiously waiting for his latest collection! So, I've been looking forward to this book since I finished reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. When I first saw the cover online (before the book's publication) featured one of my very favorite Van Gogh paintings (seriously, I even have a T-shirt from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam that features this same painting), I was even more ecstatic! So, needless to say, I held some extremely high hopes.

And I did enjoy reading this book... I'm looking forward to adding it to the books we keep in the road trip bag to be read aloud from. But, I am a little disappointed to admit that this is not my favorite book of essays by this talented writer. Favorite cover, yes. But the content, while overall hysterical, was missing something in comparison to his earlier works. And that may be because there was less about the whole Sedaris family, which is always my favorite parts... or because Sedaris has apparently grown up quite a bit since that first collection of essays. They are a bit somber now, more serious and that does detract a bit from the overall fun

Either way, I admit that while this was not his best book of essays, it is still far superior to other essayists that I have read (such as ones by authors with rather pompous sounding names), and certainly one of the best covers. And after finishing it, I am once again very excited to read his next book... I hope it has more about his family though (or Hugh's family, too... that first essay was hysterical).

Heartwarming stories of Christmas are common - tales of holiday cheer, families coming together to celebrate, and perhaps an unexpected miracle. This book doesn't have those stories.
Rather, what it has is a laugh-out-loud funny look at David Sedaris's stint as a SantaLand elf at Macy's in New York City. This story is both believable and uproarious, and shouldn't be missed. Any holiday shopper needing a pick-me-up from the hour-long lines at the mall will certainly get it from this story!
The most poignant of the stories is contained within the chapter called (if you can believe it), Dinah the Christmas Whore. This story points out the importance of serving others, and how families can come together.
The four other chapters are worth reading for an interesting, if cynical, look at the role of the season in contemporary culture. They aren't nearly as enjoyable as the other two, and have some dark twists, so do be forewarned.

For the Santaland Diaries, alone, you must buy Holidays on Ice! David Sedaris is a brilliant wit, and I'd have no problem comparing him to Mark Twain. How can I best describe the quality of this book? Well, I was sitting alone in a coffee shop, reading Holiday on Ice. I began to laugh so hard, it was at the point where strangers were staring at me, no doubt assuming I was drunk. The more I tried to stifle the laughter, the stranger the snorting noises were that I made. I was mortified, but could not stop reading! The only other thing I could compare this to is a book of essays by John Waters.

Be warned: You may not want to read this in public!

David Sedaris's biographical sketch of the holidays is a breath of fresh air for this season. So many funny situations with clever point of view. This is a fun for the holidays read, if you are tired of the syrupy heavy handed formula based Christmas books. So many funny characters, the best of which is the author's point of view. First heard excerpt on podcast This American Life. Like Mr Sedaris's other books, this is worth the read - and guarantees a grin!

This author's Greek Grandmother lived with his family when he was a child, and the poor thing had gas, especially it seemed, at the dinner table. Sedaris compares one of her emanations to starting up a chain saw. She wasn't embarrassed at all, but "nothing irritated [the author's father] quite like the sound of his children's happiness." He kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and when Grandma let loose and the kids couldn't contain their laughter, down came the spoon. The author can't remember how many times he was whacked on the head by that spoon.

I laughed until I cried and then started thinking about my reaction. What's so funny about an old woman's intestinal malfunctions and a child-beating father?

"Then would come another mighty rip..." and milk would spray out of the children's mouths and noses as they tried to keep from laughing, and down would come the spoon.

Okay, so the author's story reminded me of my own childhood with a gaseous brother and parents who were okay with corporal punishment (most parents were back in those days).

Many of this author's funny stories contain a hidden (or not-so-hidden) sting: his friendship with an old man who turned out to be a child molester; his descriptions of the hotels that still accepted smokers; or his efforts to finish ahead of a child with Down's Syndrome at swimming laps (the only lap-swimmer I can beat at our pool is an 85-year-old woman who uses a walker on dry land.)

I can't help comparing Sedaris to another one of my all-time-favorite humorists, Dave Barry. The latter is definitely more up-beat, and has alerted me to many of the humorous aspects of daily life, such as the observation that Donald Trump does indeed look like the World's Largest Cheeto. Sedaris, on the other hand finds humor in life's darker corners. I think of him as a scorpion on laughing gas. He reveals his scars and tells stories about them and I'm laughing before I realize that maybe I should be crying. Nevertheless, I'm hungry for more stories. "When You are Engulfed in Flames" is my first book by David Sedaris, but I'm on a quest to read everything I can find by him.

This author's Greek Grandmother lived with his family when he was a child, and the poor thing had gas, especially it seemed, at the dinner table. Sedaris compares one of her emanations to starting up a chain saw. She wasn't embarrassed at all, but "nothing irritated [the author's father] quite like the sound of his children's happiness." He kept a heavy serving spoon next to his plate, and when Grandma let loose and the kids couldn't contain their laughter, down came the spoon. The author can't remember how many times he was whacked on the head by that spoon.

I laughed until I cried and then started thinking about my reaction. What's so funny about an old woman's intestinal malfunctions and a child-beating father?

"Then would come another mighty rip..." and milk would spray out of the children's mouths and noses as they tried to keep from laughing, and down would come the spoon.

Okay, so the author's story reminded me of my own childhood with a gaseous brother and parents who were okay with corporal punishment (most parents were back in those days).

Many of this author's funny stories contain a hidden (or not-so-hidden) sting: his friendship with an old man who turned out to be a child molester; his descriptions of the hotels that still accepted smokers; or his efforts to finish ahead of a child with Down's Syndrome at swimming laps (the only lap-swimmer I can beat at our pool is an 85-year-old woman who uses a walker on dry land.)

I can't help comparing Sedaris to another one of my all-time-favorite humorists, Dave Barry. The latter is definitely more up-beat, and has alerted me to many of the humorous aspects of daily life, such as the observation that Donald Trump does indeed look like the World's Largest Cheeto. Sedaris, on the other hand finds humor in life's darker corners. I think of him as a scorpion on laughing gas. He reveals his scars and tells stories about them and I'm laughing before I realize that maybe I should be crying. Nevertheless, I'm hungry for more stories. "When You are Engulfed in Flames" is my first book by David Sedaris, but I'm on a quest to read everything I can find by him.

To say that David Sedaris doesn't see the world the way that others do is a grievous understatement. He finds equal humor in the bizarre and the mundane. His wit can be both razor sharp and gentle as feather. He writes and says things that maybe you've thought about before and if you haven't thought about them before you'll certainly give them plenty of thought afterwords.
Sedaris gift for storytelling is on display at its finest in this audio collection of holiday-themed stories. The most famous is, of course, "The Santaland Diaries", in which Sedaris relates in hillarious detail his experiences working as an elf at Macy's Santaland in New York. This piece is an American classic which should be compulsory reading for anyone who has worked a retail job during the holidays, not to mention anyone who has ever shopped a store during the holidays. Almost as good is "Front Row Center WIth Thaddeus Bristol" which skewers both a pompous theater critic and the sometimes attrocious children's holiday plays he's reviewing.
In all, this collection contains six stories read by Sedaris himself, his sister Amy and actress Ann Magnuson. The different voices work well to set the tone for each story over the course of the tape, and the variety helps sustain interest which can be an issue with single reader audio programs.
For many of us, the holidays mean laughter and tears. David Dedaris understands this and has given the world six of the finest tools with which to cope.

This is the second book I've read by the author, with the other being _Naked_. As with his other work, _When You Are Engulfed in Flames_ is a collection of short vignettes, with each one being fairly independent of the other. Neither book is especially laugh-out-loud funny; rather, the humour is largely dry and somewhat absurd, with the narrator usually being in some surreal predicament (e.g. being the passenger in a big-rig truck where the driver detects his homosexuality and delivers suggestions of a sexual nature). However, unlike _Naked_, none of the stories are very compelling: there is no sense of adolescent growth, confusion, and personal danger. The last story on quitting smoking is unusual and interesting, but come on, who wants to read yet another story about a middle-age man trying to put down cigarettes?

All in all, the book is a good read if you like mildly-humourous stories.

Laugh at yourself and the whole world laughs with you. It's hard to write humorous essays that stand the test of time. Will Rogers realized that and just read the newspaper to audiences while adding an occasionally wry quip to get huge laughs. Put those messages into a book, and they wouldn't have lasted.

I haven't heard David Sedaris perform in person (which he does as readings), but I'm told he's marvelous. If you have had that pleasure, you will undoubtedly hear his voice, know his timing, and see his expressions as you read this witty, self-deprecating book. I suspect that such an imagined performance would easily turn this into a five-star book.

Proust waxed poetic about his memories of a madeleine (a shell-shaped cake in the France of his youth) in stream of consciousness prose. Sedaris does the same thing for a painful boil on his derriere, his horrible inability to learn new languages, and his desire to show a little more plumpness in his derriere. The results are equally memorable . . . but much more amusing in the case of Sedaris.

Sedaris likes to put together mosaics of seemingly unconnected memories that when combined show a different image and send a different message. It's a little like a Chuck Close portrait.

Like the best humorists, he takes us into her personal life . . . into the kinds of details that few of us would openly share with the public. In exchange for yielding his privacy, he helps us see ourselves in his experiences. Who hasn't struggled with a foreign language with embarrassing consequences? Who hasn't wanted to be a little more in some aspect of their lives? Who hasn't had trouble getting rid of a bad habit?

These themes and more are explored in well-written, interesting style that lacks only an overriding sense of meaning (other than that we are all a mess) to be important prose. Some of them are hilarious, breaking into images of burlesque skits in your mind. Others are more poignant than funny, using wry humor. But he mostly doesn't stretch; rather, he expresses who he is and how he sees life.

As a former smoker, former heavy drinker, former drug user, and current homosexual with a fascination for feeding spiders, some aspect of his life will intersect with yours. But at the same time, he has exotic tastes (spending a lot of time in Normandy, learning not to smoke in Tokyo, and traveling from city to city reading his essays while staying at the finest hotels) that will make his lens different than yours. You'll never see the world the same way, as Proust changed our perceptions of madeleines.

Is it worth the trip? Yes, but I advise small reading doses. It goes down more smoothly that way.

"...and being kicked by a donkey with socks on." Sharper and darker then other Sedaris books I've read, this one still kept my attention and had me laughing uncontrollably many times throughout the book. I love how he strikes incredibly awkward & painful moments against a quirky random line of thought. On the bow tie and what it says of the wearer: "Not that you're powerless, but that you're impotent... a neutered cat in need of a good stiff cuddle." The section of tales on the monster of a landlady, Helen was a particular favorite. The power struggles of the powerless and the games they like to play with other people's lives. All as an illustration of just how useless and ineffectual she was as a person by her own choice and making. When Helen yells from her window at someone and loses her dentures in the shrubs below, Sedaris retrieves them and returns them. As soon as she has them back in place, she cusses up a blue streak. Sedaris notes: "She slid the dentures, unwashed, back into her mouth, and it was like popping the batteries back into a particularly foul toy." Similar power struggles over airplane seats and the way people react when they don't get what they want when they want. "Seventeen across: a fifteen-letter word for enlightenment. 'I am not an a**h***,' I wrote, and it fit." I think my favorite section closes the book, the periodic journal - stream of conscious, at times like fortune cookie slips - which follows Sedaris's effort to give up cigarettes. This is the sort of writing, I enjoy the most. It felt like I was getting to read Sedaris's work, direct and almost unedited, work that hadn't been worked over several times for effect.

David Sedaris gives us a book on Christmas with a twist. This is not a book about how wonderfull Christmas is but how sick and screwed up the world is with Christmas as the backdrop. My personal favorite story is about working as an Elf with Santa at a department store for the holidays. The little vignettes within the story about the going ons in the Santa department is truly funny because it is true. I worked at a famous toy chain one year and the same stories happened to me. Not one of the stories is traditional, but written with a New York sense of humor. "Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol" is about a serious review of children's Cristmas pagents and is every bit as blistering as if they were a Broadway play. "Christmas Means Giving" is about one-up-man-ship of trying to keep up with the Joneses and is every bit as funny as it is sick. If you want a book with a warped sense of Christmas that is funny, this is for you. This is definitly not for children, but it is for their parents.

By now, David Sedaris is a household name for anyone who listens to "This American Life" on NPR or reads the New Yorker religiously. I first came upon the author when my cousin read me his SantaLand Diaries. Because I do not enjoy being read to aloud, I would look over her shoulder and silently read along (which turned out to be a bit ahead), and then wait for her to get to the punchlines so that I could laugh out loud at the correct moments. The laughing out loud wasn't hard to do, but the waiting for my cousin to get there was. It was the funniest thing I had read in a good long while. I have never heard "This American Life," but I have since read many of his essays, both in his previous works of collected essays and those that have been published in the New Yorker.

WHILE YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES is Sedaris's sixth book, and it opens with a bang but slowly loses steam until the long essay at the end. "The Smoking Session" chronicles his quest to stop smoking after his mother dies of lung cancer. It starts off in traditional essay fashion and then concludes with diary entries --- dates and all --- for each day he is in Tokyo kicking the habit. Perhaps because addiction is such a powerful and personal topic, this is the funniest, the most intimate and the most human of the essays here.

This is not to say that the others are devoid of humor, intimacy or humanness, for to lack such things would be completely un-Sedaris-like. But in "The Smoking Section," where he reminisces about previously quitting drugs and alcohol, along with the present cigarettes, he is back to being Sedaris at his finest. It is almost as if this small section is the book itself and the rest of the stories are filler --- good on their own but a bit tedious side by side in book format. This may be due to the fact that many were first published elsewhere, thus they lack thematic continuity.

These essays, however, are still worthy of merit. Those that originally appeared in the New Yorker are by far the best of that bunch, and the rest are interesting for anyone already familiar with Sedaris --- for each story is one more puzzle piece into the life of the man we feel we know. Taken as a whole, they bring comedy to everyday life and a narrative to everyday experiences. He writes of his family, his schooldays, his travels, his relationships, and all other phases of life both important and trivial --- and the trivial is made significant by its insight and irony. Sedaris kept journals before becoming a writer in the professional sense of the word, and he has truly turned his personal hobby into a unique literary endeavor that appears effortless and without fault.

In WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES, like all previous works of his that I have read, his homosexuality doesn't come into play until the middle of the book. In this way he is a writer who just happens to be gay instead of a "Gay Writer." As a minority writer and an advocate for gay rights, I find it refreshing that his sexuality is treated no differently than that of anyone else. Sedaris writes of his life with his boyfriend Hugh and focuses as much on their day-to-day existence as a couple as on the fact that they are two males in love. He has his coming-out stories and his in-the-closet stories, but all these are treated as no more or no less important than everything else he writes about. The result is literature that can be read by gay males but is not written specifically for gay males, and this seems to create a sense of normalcy that homosexuals of both genders often lack in this hyper homo-aware generation, which is at once friendly and phobic.

Sedaris --- Greek, middle-class, gay, and with his own set of neuroses --- is an individual to whom we can all relate --- if not in specifics, at least in the sense of a self-conscious, second-guessing, blundering and selfish existence. He tries to be nothing other than what he is --- a human being. And for this we can't help but love him.

--- Reviewed by Shannon Luders-Manuel

David Sedaris is always hilarious and touching, and When You Are Engulfed in Flames was no exception. I listened to this on audiobook during my commute, and I was alternately laughing and tearing up on the highway! This wasn't my favorite Sedaris that I've ever read, but he's still better than most of what's out there, especially when you are listening to him on audio. He is one of my favorite narrators; his delivery is delightful. While I have purchased his audio versions of Holidays on Ice and Live at Carnegie Hall to listen to over and over again, this was one that I chose to borrow from the library and probably wouldn't purchase. I did enjoy it a lot, but I am pretty frugal (a Scroogey miser). If the price doesn't seem extravagant to you, I would say it's definitely worth it. If $25 seems like a bit much (hello, kindred spirit!) request this from your local library. You'll be glad you did.

While David Sedaris is still one of the premier essayists of this generation, his most recent book just didn't really do it for me, and I think he's in danger of kinda treading water a little bit. I mean, really, how many hilarious stories can he still have left to tell? I can remember reading 'Naked' and 'Me Talk Pretty...' and literally having to bite my tongue as tears streamed down my cheeks because I was laughing so hard (but laughing hysterically out loud for no apparent reason on the subway in New York tends to make people nervous!). This book, that didn't happen. There were a few funny stories, some good insightful moments, but I'm not sure that i'd pick up another Sedaris book. Might be time for him to try a new genre, he's a brilliant writer, but I'm just not sure how much of this kind of stuff he can keep pumping out. Still highly recommended, just start with 'Naked' or 'Me Talk Pretty...'

I really love him way too much for my own good. So I was so excited to pick up his latest book, and I truly was giggling through the first three chapters. He is just so crazy funny to me. I know that not everyone gets his humor, but I do. And I love it. He makes me want to download it and listen to him read it to me, because it's even more funny to hear him say what he's written. But as I got further through the book, it started to feel a bit forced, like he might be running out of material. Although, in some ways, he did feel more real in this book. There was more personal reflection than in his previous works, and I did like that. All in all, a mixed review (although I still will pick up anything and everything he writes). If you're a fan, read it. If you're a Sedaris first-timer, pick up Me Talk Pretty One Day and/or Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (and Holidays on Ice) first, and then come back to this one.

This a very funny - and at times, touching - collection of holiday-themed essays. The one about the time the author worked as a Christmas elf at the NYC Macy's is a classic. But you've been warned: this is not for the kids. It's not the Hallmark/Lifetime version of Christmas. It is wickedly funny and whip smart, but it won't be to everyone's taste.

I was in a funk and needed a good laugh.David Sedaris's book was just the thing to lift my mood. It's a series of anecdotes held together by the theme of smoking. David has a love-hate relationship with smoking and when he decides to quit its cold turkey in another country half-way around the world. My favorite story is about his jealous, spiteful neighbor who succumbs by falling off a chair while changing a lightbulb that David refused to change. Ouch.

"This afternoon I sat in the eighth-floor SantaLand office and was told, ` Congratulations, Mr. Sedaris. You are an elf.'" This is one of the many hilarious quotes from David Sedaris' novel Holidays on Ice which contains six enlightening Christmas stories. Also known for his other hilarious books Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, middle aged humorist Sedaris writes about his own experiences and thoughts on the Christmas season.
In the first essay entitled "SantaLand Diaries," Sedaris tells his about his crazy encounters working as an elf in the department store Macy's after getting rejected from UPS. He describes the shoppers and fellow employees with sarcastic humor. He tells about his various jobs that he works, and explains about the Magic Window position. He has to stand there and exclaim, "Step on the Magic Star and look through the window, and you can see Santa!" One day he gets bored of saying the same fifteen words over and over again, so he decides to mix things up a bit. "Step on the Magic Star and you can see Cher and Mike Tyson!" People start to get upset when they sacrifice their spot in line to see Santa to go into the Magic Star line. Needless to say, David Sedaris is never positioned in the Magic Star line again.
The next essay, "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!" is a fictional story about the ridiculousness of long family descriptions on Christmas cards. "He's made the honor roll every semester and there seems to be no stopping him!!! A year and a half left to go and already the job offers are pouring in! We love you, Kevin!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" exclaims the narrator Mrs. Dunbar. Mrs. Dunbar's ideal world, however, soon comes crashing down when a stranger named Khe Sahn suddenly comes to live with them. As it turns out, Mrs. Dunbar's "perfect" husband had a daughter in Vietnam named Khe Sahn. As the story unfolds, Khe Sahn turns their world upside down.
"Dinah, the Christmas Whore" is another essay describing the bizarre world of David Sedaris. He tells how his sister Lisa brought her friend Dinah home one day four days before Christmas. He describes the humorous way in which his family reacts to her, and the questions they ask her about her interesting life in prison and about her experiences as a prostitute.
Another essay, "Christmas Means Giving," tells the fictional story about one family's competition with their neighbors, the Cottinghams. Every year, the neighbors try to out-do the other's Christmas deeds, and as you will see it gets pretty crazy as the families try to be the best and most "giving" in the neighborhood.
Holidays on Ice is a hilarious book of essays that will keep you laughing non-stop. I recommend this novel for anyone who wants a good laugh, young or old. I personally give this book two very enthusiastic thumbs up for its dry humor. Each sarcastic and humorous essay will make you want to read the next. By the way, this collection of essays would make a great Christmas gift!

Sometimes it feels as though ever since I first discovered David Sedaris, I spend the remaining time anxiously waiting for his latest collection! So, I've been looking forward to this book since I finished reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. When I first saw the cover online (before the book's publication) featured one of my very favorite Van Gogh paintings (seriously, I even have a T-shirt from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam that features this same painting), I was even more ecstatic! So, needless to say, I held some extremely high hopes.

And I did enjoy reading this book... I'm looking forward to adding it to the books we keep in the road trip bag to be read aloud from. But, I am a little disappointed to admit that this is not my favorite book of essays by this talented writer. Favorite cover, yes. But the content, while overall hysterical, was missing something in comparison to his earlier works. And that may be because there was less about the whole Sedaris family, which is always my favorite parts... or because Sedaris has apparently grown up quite a bit since that first collection of essays. They are a bit somber now, more serious and that does detract a bit from the overall fun

Either way, I admit that while this was not his best book of essays, it is still far superior to other essayists that I have read (such as ones by authors with rather pompous sounding names), and certainly one of the best covers. And after finishing it, I am once again very excited to read his next book... I hope it has more about his family though (or Hugh's family, too... that first essay was hysterical).

Heartwarming stories of Christmas are common - tales of holiday cheer, families coming together to celebrate, and perhaps an unexpected miracle. This book doesn't have those stories.
Rather, what it has is a laugh-out-loud funny look at David Sedaris's stint as a SantaLand elf at Macy's in New York City. This story is both believable and uproarious, and shouldn't be missed. Any holiday shopper needing a pick-me-up from the hour-long lines at the mall will certainly get it from this story!
The most poignant of the stories is contained within the chapter called (if you can believe it), Dinah the Christmas Whore. This story points out the importance of serving others, and how families can come together.
The four other chapters are worth reading for an interesting, if cynical, look at the role of the season in contemporary culture. They aren't nearly as enjoyable as the other two, and have some dark twists, so do be forewarned.

For the Santaland Diaries, alone, you must buy Holidays on Ice! David Sedaris is a brilliant wit, and I'd have no problem comparing him to Mark Twain. How can I best describe the quality of this book? Well, I was sitting alone in a coffee shop, reading Holiday on Ice. I began to laugh so hard, it was at the point where strangers were staring at me, no doubt assuming I was drunk. The more I tried to stifle the laughter, the stranger the snorting noises were that I made. I was mortified, but could not stop reading! The only other thing I could compare this to is a book of essays by John Waters.

Be warned: You may not want to read this in public!

I knew it was a bad sign that I had made it to almost page 100 without laughing aloud - and barely even cracking a smile. That has never happened to me with any of Sedaris' other books. I was crying (in public) when I read 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' from laughing so hard. Not so much here.

Finally, there got to be some moments of that, but not many....and never to the tears in the eye stage. I refer to him being on a plane with a woman sitting beside him as the highlight of the passages.

I found with this and his last book - he writes less and less about his family, which were such perfect fodder for his earlier works. Maybe living abroad keeps those encounters less frequent - or maybe he or they just don't want them for public use.

The Smoking Section was ok - but I wasn't really in the mood to read his day to day diary, let alone on the topic of stopping smoking or travels in Japan.

All being said, Sedaris' writing seems a bit more focused and tighter, which isn't a bad thing. But sometimes it was the perceived ramblings that made things humourous.

For those looking to read, I would wait for paperback. Probably not worth the hardback price.

World-famous erotic artists/literatti Je.X.x.X. Gordon and Sara de Holmes (a.k.a. "The Americans") recommended to me this wonderfully short little plopper of a writer, and I couldn't be happier to have taken the advice. As Gordon pointed out in a recent SF Bay-Area appearance - after he and De Holmes re-enacted the final love scene from the Marquis De Sade's lost novel, The Merit of being Meretricious - the contemporary literary repertoire has taken a disturbing turn with its obstinate stance of high-falootin'ness. I don't mean (nor did Je.X.x.X., to my knowledge) to bemoan high-falootin' literature *per se*, but the lit journal hegemony has seemingly chosen high-falootin' writers to the point of exclusion of all others....
Enter David Sedaris...
With Sedaris, we finally have an author who can satisfy both the high-falootin' crowd and those with at least a marginal sense of humor [litmus test : if you laughed out loud (LOL'ed to you interweb addicts) during the encore of Madonna's Oklahoma City concert during the Papa don't Preach tour, you most likely have at least a marginal sense of humor.]. Here he is, a U. of Iowa graduate (or so Gordon says - I haven't checked for myself..) with a knack for post-modernistically meaningless sentences such as "We turned instinctively to our mother" (page 88, Holidays on Ice), a cleverly unoriginal first name that brings up images of infuriatingly incoherent short story authors, and cool pictures of himself smoking cigarrettes (probably either hand-rolled or European.. no, wait, probably the cheap brand that your retarded uncle buys..). Add to that formula a public-radio-worthy wittiness and a cute smile, and you've got yourself one of today's rising literary stars.
Sedaris owns! Bring it!

In a word: hilarious. This book is not long, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in laughs. I took this slim volume on a flight to visit the family during the past holiday season, and it was just the thing to put me in the spirit. One story is formatted as a newsletter to the writer's family, and I thought I was really going to disturb all the passengers seated around me with my hysterical laughter that I tried so hard to subdue. I must say that you should avoid this book like the mistletoe at an office Christmas party if you don't go for dark humor. These short stories are not warm, fuzzy Tiny Tim scenes, but they do make you draw parallels with people you may know and (...*gasp!*...) even people in your own family. The price is right, and the time is now to buy this wonderfully funny book! I also recommend the other books by David Sedaris! You'll laugh until you cry.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames isn't very funny, and Sedaris doesn't really want it to be. Certainly, I laughed a few times, but the quality of Sedaris' humor has changed; he relies heavily on scatological jokes and much less on wit and child-like observation. But when the theme of your book is death and dying, scatological humor rings the truest. After all, When You Are Engulfed in Flames is Sedaris' midlife crisis, on paper, and available for purchase at most bookstores.

Of course, then, this alters the focus of the book. Indeed, all of Sedaris' books are essentially about him, but When You Are Engulfed in Flames is much, much more about him. In Naked, Sedaris fleshes out the character and human qualities of his mother. In Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris successfully creates characters for his father, his boyfriend, his grandmother, his brother, and at least two of his sisters. As magnanimous as Sedaris is in those two books, his writing could still be read as self-centered. But it's only in When You Are Engulfed in Flames when he populates too many essays with random, undeveloped characters, which forces the focus on him, and he makes that peculiar turn into selfishness and forgets the reader. This is most evident in the last 80+ pages of the book when Sedaris subjects the reader to his diary as he tries to quit smoking.

The only stories I really liked were "Keeping Up" and "That's Amore," the latter of which is a wonderful blend of the mournful midlife crisis tone that Sedaris wants to explore, and it's also touching and funny. The rest of the essays do not have such careful crafting. I recommend all of Sedaris' other books, but I would pass on When You Are Engulfed in Flames.

Few writers make me laugh out loud, but Sedaris is one of them. Generally, that happens when he surprises me with one of his uniquely bent insights or generalizations. He'll have explained some aspect of his wacky family, which is diverting in itself, but it's the life lessons he draws that deliver the yucks. This book includes many of his familiar bits -- his childhood, his homes in France, his travels -- but lacks an overriding theme that would benefit from a front-to-back read. For that reason, this is the perfect bed table book to dip into now and then when you're short of time or between books.

I am a huge David Sedaris fan, and having said that I was prepared to be laughing my you-know-what off with every turn of the page. I had eagerly awaited the publication of this book as my summer reading treat. As I began to read, I was slightly disappointed because (as others have mentioned) this is not the side-splitter I was expecting. However, I finished the book and ended up really enjoying it for what it is---a collectiton of essays from a neroutic, obsesive former smoker and alcoholic. (And I mean all of those in the very best way possible!) Sedaris' observations are interesting, peppered with clever analogies and occasionally downright hilarious. Reading this reminded me of the kooky conversations we all have in our heads at times, and it made me want take a trip with Sedaris just to have him narriate for me! It is definitely worth the read!

This title caught my eye in line at a bookstore, heavy laden with other people's Christmas gifts. While I juggled the other titles in my hand, I opened this book and started reading chapter two, "The Understudy". I was hooked, and even laughed aloud in the long line, to the annoyance of the other customers. Had to buy it as a gift to myself, and read the book in one sitting later that week. I'm new to David Sedaris, but I immediately recognized a kindred spirit with his insane attention to details in the past. I don't care if the stories are embellished, I devoured every one and loved the little ray of light, wit, and hope that shines through in so many of the stories. A great storyteller with gallows humor and a lot of heart. Life is hard, we have to laugh more than cry. Bravo!

David Sedaris has always been dry, clever and often quite funny. When You Are Engulfed in Flames starts out familiarly so, with some entertaining stories and some stories falling flat. If you make it through the first half and have had a pretty good laugh but wouldn't put it up there, prepare to be amazed.

In the second half, David Sedaris shows his pure talent, pushing life to the edge with beautiful wit, sarcasm and the best dry humor around.

His Japan segment is sheer brilliance as he recalls his quite interesting and hilarious tales in a foreign country - but the other stories don't disappoint either. A must read, Sedaris ups his game to a sometimes relatable and always hilarious level. Never have I been more enthralled in Sedaris' work and I'm a big fan and have read most.

Throughout the beginning, some of the dry humor just really isn't that funny and at some points it seems almost as if its trying to be funny and loses the dry quality. The Harvard essay just didn't hit me that well, with some well placed jokes but what really came off as an uninteresting, mildly humorous tale. I've often found that Sedaris does his best when observing the life around him, not when creating a fictional world.

His family interactions aren't presented in a new light in the early, yet still funny, chapters and there are some hilarious stories but still nothing compared to the second half, a brilliant observance of mere life.

There are parts of this book that almost made me lose my lunch and there were times I was sorely tempted to put it down and not pick it back up again. But the little gems tossed in here and there made me stick it out and I'm not sorry I did. Mr. Sedaris is the sort of person you'd want sitting next to you at a boring dinner party…someone who'd manage to make you spit your soup all over your vest or choke on something when caught unawares by something h'd whisper only to you…he loves to shock. Good read…good mind…interesting sense of the absurd.

The below is a review of the abridged audiobook edition of the book

The author is quite humorous and his humor is quite witty, sardonic, satiric and sarcastic. The author's voice carries his humor quite well hence the audiobook is also a pleasure to read. The type of humor, however it should be stressed, is not the bright happy type. It is definitely the dark type, filled with melancholy. Many of the stories told involved children being killed in a variety of manners, including in a clothes dryer. Hence for a holiday themed book maybe a little too much for some people. Still quite funny in its own way though.

I am a great fan of David Sedaris - but this book is sort of like expecting Frank Sinatra and listening to Frank Sinatra Junior instead. Yeah, it's good, but it is not the same...
For long time readers of Sedaris, this is a reminder of how good he can be. Nothing makes me laugh as hard as "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," and of course for those who have not discovered the author's stint as a Macy's Elf, you are really in for a treat.
Let's just say that various nephews and nieces are now reading "Dinah" to their children, and I suppose that I need to find new material to redeem myself as the family curmudgeon. (Note: I also read excerpts from "The Painted Bird" by Kosinski at Thanksgiving, so I am well known as the family downer. But I digress...)
So why so few stars? This material is available elsewhere, and the selection has a bitter tone -- even for me. I was somehow hoping that there was something new that I had not seen yet. For new Sedaris readers, this is gold. For longtime fans, this is a rerun.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is another typical effort by David Sedaris. Fans of Mr. Sedaris' previous works know exactly what to expect with a Sedaris essay collection, and although they won't be completely disappointed, they might wonder if they had already read this one before.

As a huge fan of David Sedaris' previous essay collections, it is with a heavy heart that I write my fear that Mr. Sedaris has finally exhausted his repertoire. While still somewhat amusing, the stories feel recycled and tired and seem to comprise of all the antedotes we have read before.

David Sedaris needs a new shtick because after reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I felt the same way I do after I watched the third sequal to a once great movie.

The lead story in this book is hysterical, and was definately the best of the group. The author has a great style, inserting creative names and products throughout his writing to make humorous points and help the reader laugh at some of the idiocies of the holiday season. I especially enjoyed both the lead story (about working as en elf in Macy's during the holidays) and the story about school Christmas pageants. Both left me laughing at the holiday and feeling cheerful about the season.

The remaining stories were not as enjoyable, and a bit dark, especially when dealing with the death of an infant and the plight of the poor. While amusing, they did not express the holiday spirit in a way I was looking for as I read the book on Christmas Eve. The last story I found somewhat tasteless, though it started well and had some exceptionally funny lines.

Overall, a book with very funny lines from a funny author, but not a "feel good" Christmas humor book like I had hoped for.

By now just about everyone has heard that this is THE book to read during the Holidays as well as being the perfect little 'stocking stuffer' gift. In some regards this may be the case - especially with the brilliant first short story in this tiny tome, 'The Santa Land Diaries,' a hilarious memoir of Sedaris' experience working as a seasonal elf at Macy's. Unfortunately the remaining five stories fail to sustain the high level of excellence delivered early on making the remaining 2/3's of the book somewhat of a disappointment.
If you are a fan of Sedaris or curious about all the hoopla surrounding his style of humor then this book is certainly worth your while, especially with its brilliant opening and the fact that it shouldn't take you more then an hour to read from cover to cover.

Truly the author's pen is mightier than the sword as he takes on Christmas, parents, children, evangelical Christians from Kentucky, television, Macy's, the result of a dalliance during the Viet Nam War, and "keeping up with the Joneses".

This short book is much funnier than his best-selling "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" as the author's humorous cynicism is at its best. One can't put it down for fear of missing some insight into the American psyche.

Three of the stories appear to be autobiographical (with obvious changes made to "protect the innocent") wherein the author "tells" the others in the guise of another.

Regardless, Sedaris pulls no punches and will have the reader in stitches, even if there's a little guilt attached to that feeling.

This book is an acerbic look at Christmas through stories that might be true to some extent. The story of parents at Macy's not wanting to send their children to the "chocolate" Santa captures so much of how Christmas can really pan out. The fact it's narrated by a man working as an elf makes it all the richer & funnier. The parody of those annoying letters people stick in Christmas cards progresses from ridiculous to unbelievably ridiculous. This would be the best gift for anyone with a good sense of humor who tires of Christmas hype and sentimentality of the Folgers tv commercial variety. I strongly strongly recommend the audiobook version of this book. Nothing will take the sting out of drives for holiday shopping or visits as much as it will.

Mr. Sedaris little book of Christmas jeer is perfect for anyone with a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor. This is not a heart-warming compilation, but still a very funny perspective on the less holy aspects of this popular season. It would be quite the stretch in saying that some of these stories are applicable to Christmas. Mr. Sedaris also takes tangential potshots at Easter and Halloween. Though his piece about observing pathologists working in a morgue is entertaining, I failed to see its relation to any holiday theme. A quick, silly, caustic and enlightening read. But please be warned, this book will not fill you with the stereotypical holiday spirit unless you just so happen to be Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghostly visits.

Sedaris shines when his essays focus on real characters and events. His pieces on family life and French expatriate living in Me Talk Pretty One Day stand out as examples.
Holidays on Ice features fewer such gems. Most of the stories here are fictional, and in my opinion do not work nearly as well. The standout exception, however, is the hilarious SantaLand Diaries, one of the funniest things I've ever read and which in itself is well worth the price of the book. This is the real-life story of Sedaris' stint as a Macy's SantaLand elf. Sedaris focuses on our collective stupidity, but as always he mixes in just the right amount of self-depreciation to make the piece come off perfectly.
I believe that it was Tom Clancey that said that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. The figures in SantaLand Diaries (elves, Santas, and the Great American Public) behave just irrationally enough that the story has to be true. Ironically, aside from being hilariously funny Sedaris uses all of this illogical behavior to give us an interesting look at human nature.
This is a two star book that is saved by a five star story. Buy it and read the last thirty pages.

Sedaris is fun to read and easy to read in the same way that a conversation with a good friend who has a quirky sense of humor is fun and easy to hold. I've read a bunch -- a trough(?) -- of Sedaris' earlier books, and recall myself laughing no end at earlier reads. This one offered fewer laugh-out-loud moments than his earlier collections, but it did offer a vast assortment of quiet chuckle moments, which is still an accomplishment. Sedaris has a unique perspective and style. You like them or you don't. Me: I like them. I don't turn to Sedaris for enlightenment, challenge, depth; I turn to him for entertainment and a bit of light voyeuristic escapism. The one thing I can't help but wonder, though, is whether all the stories he tells are true. How many genuinely quirky experiences can one man have -- let alone recall in such detail? I'd certainly feel cheated to learn they're not true, not simply that they stretch the truth within the bounds of creative license. But I can't imagine that any dogged fact checkers are out there seeking to verify the details of Sedaris' kicked smoking habit or his parents' art collection. So, I'll have to take a lot on faith. Easy enough: it's fun to read Sedaris. As long as he continues cranking out his life vignettes, I'll continue reading them.

This was my first ever David Sedaris book.

I was delighted with the book.

I prefer both memoirs and humor, so Sedaris is ideal for my tastes.

I found myself repeatedly laughing out loud while devouring these essays. I simply can't imagine getting completely thru this book without giggling out loud at least once.

Since finishing this book I've read two more Sedaris books and I supposed I'll eventually need to get through everything else the guy has put together.

I was particularly piqued while reading about David's little brother (oh my, what a piece of work) and David's partner Hugh.

I genuinely appreciate the entertainment.

Deb

[...]

Few writers make me laugh out loud, but Sedaris is one of them. Generally, that happens when he surprises me with one of his uniquely bent insights or generalizations. He'll have explained some aspect of his wacky family, which is diverting in itself, but it's the life lessons he draws that deliver the yucks. This book includes many of his familiar bits -- his childhood, his homes in France, his travels -- but lacks an overriding theme that would benefit from a front-to-back read. For that reason, this is the perfect bed table book to dip into now and then when you're short of time or between books.

I am a huge David Sedaris fan, and having said that I was prepared to be laughing my you-know-what off with every turn of the page. I had eagerly awaited the publication of this book as my summer reading treat. As I began to read, I was slightly disappointed because (as others have mentioned) this is not the side-splitter I was expecting. However, I finished the book and ended up really enjoying it for what it is---a collectiton of essays from a neroutic, obsesive former smoker and alcoholic. (And I mean all of those in the very best way possible!) Sedaris' observations are interesting, peppered with clever analogies and occasionally downright hilarious. Reading this reminded me of the kooky conversations we all have in our heads at times, and it made me want take a trip with Sedaris just to have him narriate for me! It is definitely worth the read!

This title caught my eye in line at a bookstore, heavy laden with other people's Christmas gifts. While I juggled the other titles in my hand, I opened this book and started reading chapter two, "The Understudy". I was hooked, and even laughed aloud in the long line, to the annoyance of the other customers. Had to buy it as a gift to myself, and read the book in one sitting later that week. I'm new to David Sedaris, but I immediately recognized a kindred spirit with his insane attention to details in the past. I don't care if the stories are embellished, I devoured every one and loved the little ray of light, wit, and hope that shines through in so many of the stories. A great storyteller with gallows humor and a lot of heart. Life is hard, we have to laugh more than cry. Bravo!

David Sedaris has always been dry, clever and often quite funny. When You Are Engulfed in Flames starts out familiarly so, with some entertaining stories and some stories falling flat. If you make it through the first half and have had a pretty good laugh but wouldn't put it up there, prepare to be amazed.

In the second half, David Sedaris shows his pure talent, pushing life to the edge with beautiful wit, sarcasm and the best dry humor around.

His Japan segment is sheer brilliance as he recalls his quite interesting and hilarious tales in a foreign country - but the other stories don't disappoint either. A must read, Sedaris ups his game to a sometimes relatable and always hilarious level. Never have I been more enthralled in Sedaris' work and I'm a big fan and have read most.

Throughout the beginning, some of the dry humor just really isn't that funny and at some points it seems almost as if its trying to be funny and loses the dry quality. The Harvard essay just didn't hit me that well, with some well placed jokes but what really came off as an uninteresting, mildly humorous tale. I've often found that Sedaris does his best when observing the life around him, not when creating a fictional world.

His family interactions aren't presented in a new light in the early, yet still funny, chapters and there are some hilarious stories but still nothing compared to the second half, a brilliant observance of mere life.

There are parts of this book that almost made me lose my lunch and there were times I was sorely tempted to put it down and not pick it back up again. But the little gems tossed in here and there made me stick it out and I'm not sorry I did. Mr. Sedaris is the sort of person you'd want sitting next to you at a boring dinner party…someone who'd manage to make you spit your soup all over your vest or choke on something when caught unawares by something h'd whisper only to you…he loves to shock. Good read…good mind…interesting sense of the absurd.

The below is a review of the abridged audiobook edition of the book

The author is quite humorous and his humor is quite witty, sardonic, satiric and sarcastic. The author's voice carries his humor quite well hence the audiobook is also a pleasure to read. The type of humor, however it should be stressed, is not the bright happy type. It is definitely the dark type, filled with melancholy. Many of the stories told involved children being killed in a variety of manners, including in a clothes dryer. Hence for a holiday themed book maybe a little too much for some people. Still quite funny in its own way though.

I am a great fan of David Sedaris - but this book is sort of like expecting Frank Sinatra and listening to Frank Sinatra Junior instead. Yeah, it's good, but it is not the same...
For long time readers of Sedaris, this is a reminder of how good he can be. Nothing makes me laugh as hard as "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," and of course for those who have not discovered the author's stint as a Macy's Elf, you are really in for a treat.
Let's just say that various nephews and nieces are now reading "Dinah" to their children, and I suppose that I need to find new material to redeem myself as the family curmudgeon. (Note: I also read excerpts from "The Painted Bird" by Kosinski at Thanksgiving, so I am well known as the family downer. But I digress...)
So why so few stars? This material is available elsewhere, and the selection has a bitter tone -- even for me. I was somehow hoping that there was something new that I had not seen yet. For new Sedaris readers, this is gold. For longtime fans, this is a rerun.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is another typical effort by David Sedaris. Fans of Mr. Sedaris' previous works know exactly what to expect with a Sedaris essay collection, and although they won't be completely disappointed, they might wonder if they had already read this one before.

As a huge fan of David Sedaris' previous essay collections, it is with a heavy heart that I write my fear that Mr. Sedaris has finally exhausted his repertoire. While still somewhat amusing, the stories feel recycled and tired and seem to comprise of all the antedotes we have read before.

David Sedaris needs a new shtick because after reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames, I felt the same way I do after I watched the third sequal to a once great movie.

The lead story in this book is hysterical, and was definately the best of the group. The author has a great style, inserting creative names and products throughout his writing to make humorous points and help the reader laugh at some of the idiocies of the holiday season. I especially enjoyed both the lead story (about working as en elf in Macy's during the holidays) and the story about school Christmas pageants. Both left me laughing at the holiday and feeling cheerful about the season.

The remaining stories were not as enjoyable, and a bit dark, especially when dealing with the death of an infant and the plight of the poor. While amusing, they did not express the holiday spirit in a way I was looking for as I read the book on Christmas Eve. The last story I found somewhat tasteless, though it started well and had some exceptionally funny lines.

Overall, a book with very funny lines from a funny author, but not a "feel good" Christmas humor book like I had hoped for.

By now just about everyone has heard that this is THE book to read during the Holidays as well as being the perfect little 'stocking stuffer' gift. In some regards this may be the case - especially with the brilliant first short story in this tiny tome, 'The Santa Land Diaries,' a hilarious memoir of Sedaris' experience working as a seasonal elf at Macy's. Unfortunately the remaining five stories fail to sustain the high level of excellence delivered early on making the remaining 2/3's of the book somewhat of a disappointment.
If you are a fan of Sedaris or curious about all the hoopla surrounding his style of humor then this book is certainly worth your while, especially with its brilliant opening and the fact that it shouldn't take you more then an hour to read from cover to cover.

Truly the author's pen is mightier than the sword as he takes on Christmas, parents, children, evangelical Christians from Kentucky, television, Macy's, the result of a dalliance during the Viet Nam War, and "keeping up with the Joneses".

This short book is much funnier than his best-selling "Me Talk Pretty Some Day" as the author's humorous cynicism is at its best. One can't put it down for fear of missing some insight into the American psyche.

Three of the stories appear to be autobiographical (with obvious changes made to "protect the innocent") wherein the author "tells" the others in the guise of another.

Regardless, Sedaris pulls no punches and will have the reader in stitches, even if there's a little guilt attached to that feeling.

This book is an acerbic look at Christmas through stories that might be true to some extent. The story of parents at Macy's not wanting to send their children to the "chocolate" Santa captures so much of how Christmas can really pan out. The fact it's narrated by a man working as an elf makes it all the richer & funnier. The parody of those annoying letters people stick in Christmas cards progresses from ridiculous to unbelievably ridiculous. This would be the best gift for anyone with a good sense of humor who tires of Christmas hype and sentimentality of the Folgers tv commercial variety. I strongly strongly recommend the audiobook version of this book. Nothing will take the sting out of drives for holiday shopping or visits as much as it will.

Mr. Sedaris little book of Christmas jeer is perfect for anyone with a quirky, sarcastic sense of humor. This is not a heart-warming compilation, but still a very funny perspective on the less holy aspects of this popular season. It would be quite the stretch in saying that some of these stories are applicable to Christmas. Mr. Sedaris also takes tangential potshots at Easter and Halloween. Though his piece about observing pathologists working in a morgue is entertaining, I failed to see its relation to any holiday theme. A quick, silly, caustic and enlightening read. But please be warned, this book will not fill you with the stereotypical holiday spirit unless you just so happen to be Ebenezer Scrooge before the ghostly visits.

Sedaris shines when his essays focus on real characters and events. His pieces on family life and French expatriate living in Me Talk Pretty One Day stand out as examples.
Holidays on Ice features fewer such gems. Most of the stories here are fictional, and in my opinion do not work nearly as well. The standout exception, however, is the hilarious SantaLand Diaries, one of the funniest things I've ever read and which in itself is well worth the price of the book. This is the real-life story of Sedaris' stint as a Macy's SantaLand elf. Sedaris focuses on our collective stupidity, but as always he mixes in just the right amount of self-depreciation to make the piece come off perfectly.
I believe that it was Tom Clancey that said that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. The figures in SantaLand Diaries (elves, Santas, and the Great American Public) behave just irrationally enough that the story has to be true. Ironically, aside from being hilariously funny Sedaris uses all of this illogical behavior to give us an interesting look at human nature.
This is a two star book that is saved by a five star story. Buy it and read the last thirty pages.

Sedaris is fun to read and easy to read in the same way that a conversation with a good friend who has a quirky sense of humor is fun and easy to hold. I've read a bunch -- a trough(?) -- of Sedaris' earlier books, and recall myself laughing no end at earlier reads. This one offered fewer laugh-out-loud moments than his earlier collections, but it did offer a vast assortment of quiet chuckle moments, which is still an accomplishment. Sedaris has a unique perspective and style. You like them or you don't. Me: I like them. I don't turn to Sedaris for enlightenment, challenge, depth; I turn to him for entertainment and a bit of light voyeuristic escapism. The one thing I can't help but wonder, though, is whether all the stories he tells are true. How many genuinely quirky experiences can one man have -- let alone recall in such detail? I'd certainly feel cheated to learn they're not true, not simply that they stretch the truth within the bounds of creative license. But I can't imagine that any dogged fact checkers are out there seeking to verify the details of Sedaris' kicked smoking habit or his parents' art collection. So, I'll have to take a lot on faith. Easy enough: it's fun to read Sedaris. As long as he continues cranking out his life vignettes, I'll continue reading them.

This was my first ever David Sedaris book.

I was delighted with the book.

I prefer both memoirs and humor, so Sedaris is ideal for my tastes.

I found myself repeatedly laughing out loud while devouring these essays. I simply can't imagine getting completely thru this book without giggling out loud at least once.

Since finishing this book I've read two more Sedaris books and I supposed I'll eventually need to get through everything else the guy has put together.

I was particularly piqued while reading about David's little brother (oh my, what a piece of work) and David's partner Hugh.

I genuinely appreciate the entertainment.

Deb

[...]

Another collection of essays from humorist David Sedaris, Holidays on Ice is not his best work. The stories, all dealing with the holiday season, are hit or miss, making for a very uneven book.

Far and away, the funniest, most irreverent essay included here is "SantaLand Diaries," wherein Sedaris recounts his days working as a Macy's elf -- at the age of 33. This story alone makes Holidays readable, but if you're looking to begin reading David Sedaris, pass on this book and pick up Me Talk Pretty One Day instead.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris is his latest book of short stories. Most of these stories center around his life with his boyfriend, Hugh, but some don't. I'd heard Monster Mash before because it's also on Holidays On Ice. Most of the stories are humorous and some are hilarious.

Carl and I roared with laughter as we listened to In The Waiting Room. In it, Sedaris tells about quitting French classes (he was living in France) and just using d'accord (roughly translates as okay) as his all-purpose answer and the troubles it got him into. Since we lived in France for two years, we could really relate to this story.

There is lots of adult language and crude humor in these stories. Town and Country in particular, but I will admit to chuckling as I listened to it. Just keep in mind that these stories aren't for children or those who are easily offended.

Like any collection of short stories, some of these are better than others. Overall, I enjoyed them.

David Sedaris has a sick sense of humor, and he conveys it well in this book of Christmas shorts. It opens with the extremely funny "Santaland Diaries", giving an insider's view of elves at Macy's. Next comes "Season's Greetings", an overenthusiastic 'family newsletter' that spins off into satirical tangents with the unexpected addition of a Vietnamese daughter. "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" tells of young David's encounter with his father's "Christmas present" ::wink:: "Front Row with Thaddeus Bristol" is a theatrical review of the Christmas pageants in the elementary schools (we've all had to suffer). "Based on a True Story" is a somewhat sickeningly funny look at a hustler trying to gather holiday special ideas. Finally, "Christmas Means Giving" rounds out the collection, telling of two families who can't stop competing with each other. I'm a newcomer to Sedaris's wit, and the next book on my list is 'Naked'. This was a great way to be introduced without being overwhelmed--even if they are Christmas stories being read in July.

It is hard to pick one set of stars for a book that is full of different essays. I would give some of the essays 4 stars, others 3, and maybe even some 2s. If I look at the book as a whole, I liked it. There are a few stories that stick out -- like Santaland Diaries (about Sedaris' stint as an Elf at Macy's Santaland in NY) and Six to Eight Black Men (about how the Netherlands celebrates Christmas with "black peters"). All of the stories share Sedaris' wit, and some star people who probably belong on Santa's naughty list. I enjoyed the stories that were about Sedaris and his family more than the ones that were not.

This book is definitely not for everyone, as the humor is often times crude. But half of the essays are well thought out and had me laughing out loud. The narration is what you'd expect from a professional comedian. David's style is a bit monotone, but that is part of his whole appeal. I particularly liked how he gives humanlike personalities to inanimate objects. It's a combination of childlike humor with a jaded adult outlook.

I liked the chapter about his stay in Japan. He cleverly avoided the clichés most comedians write about and gave us a nice perspective into his experiences learning Japanese.

I've heard Sedaris  and had favorable impression of him. I wish I'd not read this book. Apparently 65% think he's clever ; cute as a button ; a subtle, sarcastic  genius; and the like . I found him twisted, depressing and dull. The elf story  is too cute by half. The Vietnamese girl in the family story is funny if you think Sedaris' instruction to   "watch " the baby can be interpreted in some alternate reality as "wash " the baby in a laundry machine until dead. It's a sick joke on a third grade level. Fact? Fiction ? Who knows or cares. New Yorker refuses to label his work nonfiction because it can't be fact checked. A wierd Christmas downer of a book.

Brilliant! Disturbing! Deliciously short and appropriate for holiday evening reading. Tuck this one in your travel bag when you go home for the holidays to use as an escape or distraction. I don't want to give too much away, but the piece on working as an elf at Santaland should be familiar to public radio listeners, and it is hilarious. The visciously biting review of an elementary school Christmas pageant, "Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol" is another terrific read.

This is a book to own and open up every holiday season to read the stories over again. Pass it around the house. It's a very quick read.

Ok, so Some people loved this book, some hated it and as a huge Sedaris fan I fall closer to the "loved it" end of the spectrum. It has been a fun, if twisted summer read and I have laughed out loud several times. OK, the twist? Not as funny as some of his books (I still read Me Talk Pretty One Day anytime I need cheering up or feel like hurting myself laughing) but not quite as twisted as some of his other works, this is perhaps a slightly more mature Sedaris. Still totally worth the read and just a light summer read for those that are not really into chick lit or testosterone driven novels.

I've never read anything of his that I didn't like a lot. Not only is he humorous, but he is very insightful to the subtle absurdities that we all experience. He will tell his private thoughts and feelings, which make me feel great as I have similar situations and find humor in the same.

Not every story is funny, but it doesn't matter because all are interesting. I'm feeling a bit sad as I am on the last chapter in my Kindle book, but am grateful that I have another ready to take it's place.

I bought David Sedaris's "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" at the airport because I needed something to read on the plane. I had recalled seeing some good reviews of his books and they seemed to be quite popular. I am not sure if his little vignettes into his life are supposed to be humorous or satirical. I think one professional reviewer described his genre as "quirky memoir". I guess that fits. I do know it took until page 211 to get an actual, out loud laugh from me. The author was describing how he tormented his sisters when he was younger by telling them just before bed that a particular spider they had seen earlier in the day would likely find them again that night. I can relate to that. I think a lot of my problem with the book is that I just cannot relate to the life of a gay man with, essentially, an East Coast upbringing. I think it is the same reason I could never really get into Sex and the City; I just can't relate to a group of mature women looking for romance in a cosmopolitan setting. There were a few more laugh out load moments after that, but mostly the stories just seemed a bit contrived and the author just a bit too sarcastic and whiny. By comparison, I am now reading "Driving Like Crazy" by P.J. O'Rourke and that has got me laughing my rear end off. I think if you really want to read someone who is funny try Bill Bryson, PJ O'Rourke, Anthony Bourdain or even Michael Pollan who can turn a wry, witty phrase just as subtly as flipping a fried egg with chopsticks.

David Sedaris delivers a wonderful easy read that will both have you laughing and make you think. This is my first time reading anything from this author but I will be sure to grab another of his works off the shelf soon. When You Are Engulfed In Flames is a collection of short stories or essays that seem to follow different times of his life and chronicle some astute, if not absurd, observations and actions. His witty humor is often pointed inwards as well as outwards to society and reveals his personal genius in writing as you review some of his exploits from youth through his present day life. The nature of his writing in short contained stories was also a personal pleasure for me. It was easy to fit in during the busy days and always felt familiar when I picked it up again as he was interwoven reoccurring characters from his life through most, if not all, of the stories.

He works his magic by frequently changing focus through the storyline while maintaining the original plot through to the end. As he describes a nice day in his apartment, he may take you on a rampage through the evils of wallpaper patterns or his ability to make coffee with the water from a freshly picked bouquet of flowers given to him by his partner. His observations of other people may even be considered offensive, but coming from a self described whiny push-over of a homosexual man, you come to honor and appreciate his unique perspective and the truths embedded in his articles. At first I took his telling of these hidden truths as somewhat funny by the sarcastic and self loathing way he writes, but then the honesty and sincerity of his views crept in and I came to appreciate the laughter in a different way. The way you would appreciate your friend privately telling you that there was a bit of lettuce on your chin when you're on a double date with someone way out of your league, or the way you appreciate the familiar song your mother sang when she used to cook dinner.

In his chapter "The Man in the Hut" he tells of his stay in France and of a special "slow" and "gentle" neighbor. The serious tale of a not so right family, sexual abuse, and the recently released from prison father, are punctuated by brief points of humor. His easy manner and willingness to go along with almost anything coupled with his limited knowledge of the language add to his self created predicament. He views the man as a harmless person to be pitied and tries to hide his inability to say no to such a harmless man from his partner and neighbors. Only in reflection does he weigh the consequences of his actions as they may impact his partner and their social standing. In his own way, he tells his tale and has you laughing at his absurd thoughts about keeping up appearances and the selfish thought of receiving discounts on train fare from someone he shouldn't be associating with. This book will make you think about some of your own motivations as well as keep you laughing. I would recommend this to anyone who enjoys an humorous read and does not take themselves too seriously. I look forward to the next Sedaris book I pick up.

Most hilarious Christmas tales around. You will never look at Christmas the same after exploring Sedaris's amazingly funny but somewhat dark world. It's a blessing that I read the stories, especially the now classic SANTALAND DIARIES in the end of October to remind myself not to fall into the trap of the Christmas commercialism. Totally refreshing after years years years of overly sentimental and corny holiday tales. I am amazed at Sedaris's guts to write down a lot of things that most of us would rather to keep to ourselves and that makes me realize what a hypocrite I am. You all must simply have this holiday gem!!!

This book was a really fantastic collection of 6 short stories regarding the holiday season. I had heard so much about David Sedaris and what a talented satirical writer he was, and I was much impressed by his ability to parody the American publics love/hate relationship during the holiday season. His life as an elf in the Macys's shopping store in New York had me laughing out loud. And the upbeat Christmas letter that includes the introduction of a Vietamese stepchild was hilarious.
I finished the book in two days of light reading and realized the author is truly dark and twisted but extremely talented. "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is next on my list. I guarantee you'll like this book, but just to add to the fervor of the writing, I suggest you read it a week before Christmas during your most hellish and frantic points of your life; it'll add to the hilarity of your situation.

This holiday book by David Sedaris is a collection of sophisticated, sardonic, and quite superb stories. His style reminds me of Cleveland Amory (remember him? several years ago he wrote reviews for TV Guide--yes, this bit of information dates me)--somewhat crumudeonly, but very entertaining and funny.

Among other things, Sedaris shares his take on Christmas pageants and working as an elf during the holidays.

Written in a totally different style, Christmas Gifts, Christmas Voices takes a look at how simple acts of thoughtfulnes came have a great impact.

After a glowing recommendation from my sister, I got this book and have to say I have mixed feelings about it. The (pseudo) non-fiction essays (Santland Diaries and Diana the Christmas Whore) are extremely funny and well worth reading. Unfortunately, the fiction essays are horrible. They are very mean spirited, pessimistic, and well, just not very funny. The satire is laid on thick and shameless, as if he had a bet going to see how absurd and over the top he could make a story. And each one is worse than the next. I was drowning in it. I've heard better reviews about some of his other books, so I'll give those a try. I would never recommend anyone buy this book, but please check it out from your library if just to read those non fiction essays.

David Sedaris is the Dave Barry of the NPR set--and just about as funny. ("Ain't I a riot?" he silently asks the reader every three sentences or so, and the answer is no.)

The story about the prostitute might have been amusing, if Sedaris had chosen to poke fun at the upper-middle-class family for being a bunch of sheltered and condescending weenies. Instead he seemed to think the family was pre-e-etty edgy for entertaining a prostitute (a PROSTITUTE! har-dee-har-HAR! an unattractive one! chuckle! in ripped fishnet stockings!) in their nice suburban home.

Wouldn't all NPR listeners like to be so awesomely cool and free of social prejudice as to have over for dinner a real-live beaten-up prostitute who works at a cafeteria and smokes? How gritty! How true to life! How...anthropologically compelling!

Buy this book -- a paperback copy is good, not a Kindle version -- and put it with your Christmas/Holiday stuff. Just store it in the boxes along with your tree stand (not to be confused with your deer hunting tree stand...), Christmas balls (don't confuse those either), family recipes and homemade ornaments. Then pull Holidays on Ice out each year and read it during the holidays. Preferably with a stiff drink in your hand. Add a rosemary sprig with a few speared cranberries to whatever you're drinking if you want to really get festive about it. The stories are short, quick, and highly enjoyable (TWSS). I swear it's been a holiday tradition of mine for years. Happy Holiday Reading!

I love to read over all the other reviews to see what other people are saying before I write my own review. This can take a while because I sometimes get sidetracked and start clicking on the reviewers pages, to see what other books they liked if I agreed with what they said. In this case, I was looking up all the reviewers pages who DIDN'T like this book because I'm like, if they didn't like this book, what the heck do they like? What would rate 5 stars in their opinions? (I wasn't impressed with the answer by the way) Anyway, I sometimes get the feeling that peoples expectations are just way too high. I know that different people have different types of humor and you can't please everyone. But to me, David Sedaris just covers so much ground that the rest of us have to tread too. I mean, even if you can't laugh at it surely you can relate? I have read all his books and he just makes me laugh so hard. To be perfectly honest here, I was originally going to say that this was not his best book and recommend Me Talk Pretty One Day or (why can't I think of the name of the one before that, which was my favorite?). But these other reviewers got me thinking. How much should a person really expect from a book? Should it hold the secrets to the universe? Should it have you rolling on the floor? Should it change your life? How much can one book do, really? Even the bible, for all its greatness, has some pretty dull moments. When I am reading a book, or watching a movie even, as long as I am engaged and entertained for that period of time I am pretty happy. If I'm bored or can't sit through it thats a different story, and that happens. But in a book like this if it keeps you reading while making you think a little, smile a lot, and laugh out loud a few times, what more do you want? It does this and its definitely worth the five stars.

There is a neurotic, but irreplaceable sensibility to David Sedaris's "when you are engulfed in flames". As the title even suggests using "You Are" instead of "You're". He is ever so careful to do the right thing and explains his search for protocol with each freudian essay. This is why I love him sooo, he reminds me of just how beautiful and interesting awkward is. "Good"- people question in a cautious way that both abandons but secures further investigation into any interaction and perhaps we all could use less gimmick in our lives especially as this current age of "advertising" closes.

To be specific the author embraces those small moments enriched with insecurity and intuition that make life so fascinating and painful. Hs stories range from ceasing to smoke, ocd siblings to co-dependence. One will not find the most profound passage they've ever read in this book but rather a heartwarming friend and perfect traveling companion reveals himself with each essay.

Listen, anyone who can make you laugh out-loud in NYC traffic has got to be alright! I highly recommend this book.

I'll confess that short story and essay collections take me forever to read, they're just too easy to put down. Also, my affections for Sedaris run hot and cool; he's funny, there's no getting around it. However, I find that I tend to tire of his "little" stories when taken in large doses and prefer listening to Sedaris read his own work. His storytelling gifts are prodigious, as well as idiosyncratic; no one can read Sedaris better than Sedaris.

So, what's my opinion of this new collection? Mixed; there is certainly a redundancy of themes and characters. However, if you're a fan (and I am), you'll find this exactly as you'd expect. I skipped around and back and forth. My favorite pieces were the masterful "This Old House," "That's Amore" (you'll never forget Helen), "Old Faithful" and the final, novella length, "The Smoking Section." On the whole the collection is too long and not as strong as the sum of its parts. However, what works is vintage, making it well worth reading.

About 7 years or so ago, a friend handed me a copy of "Me Talk Pretty One Day," insisting it was hilarious. I read it and concur: it was hilarious.

Thus it was I picked this up without checking these reviews first.

I'm not sure if Sedaris creatively exhausted himself with his first couple of books, but this book is nowhere near as funny or as memorable as that other one. It's not really remarkable at all.

It's true that occasionally his essays take a turn that makes you sit bolt upright, such as the trucker's creepy and unexpected digression (p. 66), but for the most part, Sedaris and I have little in common, so, since he lacks true genius, it's only occasionally that he can connect. Maybe this is a little too harsh: the book is not AWFUL. But any way you cut it, I certainly won't be reading another Sedaris book.

One thing that does constantly annoy me about Sedaris: before reading any of his essays, you're expected to know that he's gay and has been living with his partner, Hugh, for many years in the north of France. You're just supposed to know things like that.

David Sedaris somehow knows how to reach back again and again into his personal life and give the reader a public performance that never fails to please. Sitting with Engulfed in Flames has to be like sitting in the den listening to the author craft his experience, word by precise word, until you are on your own carpet with Sedaris's prose poking you in the ribs until you pass out from laughing. His brilliant take on family, his twist on reality, his grasp on just the right phrasem his turning the intimate into the shared -- all of it works like a crazy quilt that engulfs the reader not in flames, but in anti-sedating hysterics even about one's own weird and painful family memories.

This is David Sedaris at his best: openly sharing his daily experience as a chain-smoking, shyly curious homosexual, a combination that means his word is like no other.

This is a collection of laugh-out-loud (I did) essays where Sedaris leaves no stone unturned - his neighbors, family, and partner (and of course himself) must know by now that they are always being carefully watched for moments that will lead to perfect little scenes of everyday human pointlessness.

These Christmas stories really are very unique, and uplifting. They are a great partner to travel with by plane or train to the family's house for turkey and plumb pudding. Out of all the stories, the one which gave me the most laughs was the final story "Christmas Means Giving" which shows just how far competition between neighbors 'could' go. Each story is very well written, and they are so different from one an other. I certainly want to read more of David Sedaris's short stores, and I hope also he goes the distance and tries to write a full length novel.

Simply put the last story, or set of stories about quitting smoking, seem like filler. The ending feels more like snippets of stories instead of containing a beginning, middle and end. Even given that it is still very enjoyable and a great and quick read. 90% of the book is classic Sedaris hysterical, brilliant laugh out loud stories. If you are a fan you will love it, if you have never read a Sedaris book, check out Barrel Fever or an earlier title before reading this one, then read this one!.

If anyone thinks that they own the title of World's Worst Christmas Elf, buying this book is a must! The selections are short and sweet-bittersweet that is. I hate the holidays; I hate spending time in "lockdown" with my family, but this book is worth all of the suffering. Sedaris is a must, from the fun of "Dinah, the Christmas Whore", to the ghastly family newsletters every spunky family feels they must send me, "Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family". I picked this baby up at a white elephant grabbag. It is, by far, superior to the pretzels my uncle selected or the chocolates snatched up by my mother. If anyone out there is a sarcastic, humorous, realist-this is the book to go for.

I really enjoyed reading this book, I'll admit it wasn't as big as I had expected it to be, but it was worth it!! I, unlike most reviewers, enjoyed "Santaland Diaries" the least, I really liked "Greetings to our family and friends", "Based on a true story", and "Christmas Means Giving"! You definatly have to have a sense of humor when reading this book and don't take the stories too seriously (especially "Christmas Means Giving"!) But all in all the book really humored me and I enjoyed reading it!

Immediately before reading this I had read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and loved it so much I thought I'd pick this up. It just happened to be the holidays so this seemed a natural choice. I was very disappointed.

Four of the six entries here are fictional which halps make his biographical essays that much more believeable. The "Santaland Diaries" is decent. There are funny parts but the diary aspect of it makes it choppy and I have found his humor best when he controls the flow of the story rather than cutting together some events.

The other biographical essay here is "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" which I found the best essay here but is what I would call the literary version of a b-side.

By the end I found that I was enjoying the entries so little I was skipping large chunks hoping to get to a good part.

After my first book from David Sedaris I was eagerly looking forward to another one. After this I'm not so sure.

I read somewhere that this was a good book to read if you are just starting off with Sedaris. I don't know if that is true, since I have never read any other Sedaris books other than this. But I will say that now that I read this one, I want to read them all. I read a lot of reviews saying that this book was hilarious. It was not hilarious - not all of it. There were a lot of parts that are very funny for their honesty; and others that are funny but not in that 'HAHA' way. Mostly I was just charmed by Sedaris' writing style and stories. No matter how strange the situations are - and believe me, some of them are really strange - he finds a way to make them relate-able.

To call David of Sedaris's sense of humor unique, might be an understatement. In "Holiday's on Ice." David delivers his wicked black humor with a Christmas theme that will doubtfully ever translate into a classic made for TV movie. These are certainly not heart warming, life affirming tales to read in front of the fire place with a nice glass of eggnog. To Sedaris, Christmas is an odd assortment of disgruntled department store elves, ..., tv executives, and suburbanites struggling with the "true" meaning of Christmas. "Give until it bleeds."
As always Sedaris uses his unique viewpoints, and sometimes personal experiences to create rich and creative stories. "Holidays on Ice" is a collection of his finest holiday based stories. While not as involving and complete as "Naked," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day." "Holidays On Ice" is a nice Sedaris for beginners book. Stories like "Santa Land Diaries,"
and "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" are as involved, and as well told as any other story in his longer works. "Holidays on Ice" proves once again that David Sedaris is one of the finest Humorists, and all around story tellers in America today.

As long as you don't expect a plot, because there is none. Still, it was fun to read. My first Sedaris book. Didn't surprise me to find out he's from Binghamton, NY, also the hometown of Rod Serling. Weird stuff comes out of that town.

I found each story very intriguing and funny. It is interesting to see how David's life changes with exposure to fame, some money and a good companion. And yet... David seems to not change at all in his essential self.

It was particularly amusing to read his view of Japan. I have spent a lot of time there, and found his views both irreverent and gentle at the same time. All I can say is that I hope he finds other excuses to live in other countries sometime soon.

Being a huge fan of Sedaris' laugh-out loud work, I must admit that I was a bit disappointed with Holidays on Ice. Although this collection of short stories, some fictional, some not, starts out on a great note with "The Santa Land diaries," the humor quickly dries out with "Season's Greetings," and "Christmas Means Giving." Overall, his autobiographical work is much more entertaining than the far-fetched humor he tries to convey in his fictional work.

Overall, I found this book good only as a travel companion and as a light read to get you in the mood for the holiday season. Aside from "Santa Land diaries," don't expect to be rolling with laughter, for the humor in the other stories reeks of Saturday Night Live or MadTV. However, do not be discouraged by this book if this is your first encounter with Sedaris; his other material is much more original and manifest much more shock value than can ever be found here. I would recommend starting with "Naked," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day" to avoid getting a bad first impression from his work.

David Sedaris is a witty author who writes essays that can be simultaneously humorous and disturbing.
This collection of stories confirms this impression, and they are loosely autobiographical, and sometimes veer into the purely fictitious. "Santaland Diaries" falls in the first category as the humble author writes "I am a thirty-three-year-old man applying for a job as an elf." He writes about the dark side of a full time elf job, selecting his elf name of "Crumpet", donning a green velvet elf suit, and seeing things in Santaland that no living person would ever care to see.
An elf with a handle bar mustache hitting on the moms, a child peeing on fake snow. Dark, yes.
In "Let It Snow", he writes of being locked out of his house with his siblings on the fifth day of a snowstorm, as his mom suffered a "little nervous breakdown" and enjoyed drinking wine while the children desperately clammered to get in the house, eventually faking a death to get inside.
"Season's Greetings" is a family holiday season newsletter, which starts with desperate circumstances and goes on methodically listing a crescendo of catastrophes; the perfect antidote to those sweet bragging holiday letters we all have received, and maybe, even written.
Mr. Sedaris either works for you or not. You get to choose.

First let me admit, I find Sedaris very uneven. Some of his pieces go whizzing by me, and I fail to see the humor. Others are so perfect that I can't believe it's the same guy. (For instant he had a recent completely hilarious and brilliant piece on NPR about being forced to take guitar lessons. What's that from?) I got this collection after I heard that piece and the one about being a Macy's elf felt like the same genius. It's the jewel in the cvrowd here. Others, though, I couldn't finish reading. So take your chances here and take your pick. My guess is there is SOMEthing for almost anyone.

So far I have only read, "Me Talk Pretty" by this author and I can say that it was one of my favorite books! I had never laughed out loud so hard at a book before. That book left me very eager to read another one of Sedaris books and over the holidays I picked up "Holidays on Ice" - - If you are looking for something to cheer you up during the stressful holiday times, pick up this little book by Sedaris. It's short but full of great short stories that will have you chuckling out loud!

David Sedaris somehow knows how to reach back again and again into his personal life and give the reader a public performance that never fails to please. Sitting with Engulfed in Flames has to be like sitting in the den listening to the author craft his experience, word by precise word, until you are on your own carpet with Sedaris's prose poking you in the ribs until you pass out from laughing. His brilliant take on family, his twist on reality, his grasp on just the right phrasem his turning the intimate into the shared -- all of it works like a crazy quilt that engulfs the reader not in flames, but in anti-sedating hysterics even about one's own weird and painful family memories.

This is David Sedaris at his best: openly sharing his daily experience as a chain-smoking, shyly curious homosexual, a combination that means his word is like no other.

This is a collection of laugh-out-loud (I did) essays where Sedaris leaves no stone unturned - his neighbors, family, and partner (and of course himself) must know by now that they are always being carefully watched for moments that will lead to perfect little scenes of everyday human pointlessness.

These Christmas stories really are very unique, and uplifting. They are a great partner to travel with by plane or train to the family's house for turkey and plumb pudding. Out of all the stories, the one which gave me the most laughs was the final story "Christmas Means Giving" which shows just how far competition between neighbors 'could' go. Each story is very well written, and they are so different from one an other. I certainly want to read more of David Sedaris's short stores, and I hope also he goes the distance and tries to write a full length novel.

Simply put the last story, or set of stories about quitting smoking, seem like filler. The ending feels more like snippets of stories instead of containing a beginning, middle and end. Even given that it is still very enjoyable and a great and quick read. 90% of the book is classic Sedaris hysterical, brilliant laugh out loud stories. If you are a fan you will love it, if you have never read a Sedaris book, check out Barrel Fever or an earlier title before reading this one, then read this one!.

If anyone thinks that they own the title of World's Worst Christmas Elf, buying this book is a must! The selections are short and sweet-bittersweet that is. I hate the holidays; I hate spending time in "lockdown" with my family, but this book is worth all of the suffering. Sedaris is a must, from the fun of "Dinah, the Christmas Whore", to the ghastly family newsletters every spunky family feels they must send me, "Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family". I picked this baby up at a white elephant grabbag. It is, by far, superior to the pretzels my uncle selected or the chocolates snatched up by my mother. If anyone out there is a sarcastic, humorous, realist-this is the book to go for.

I really enjoyed reading this book, I'll admit it wasn't as big as I had expected it to be, but it was worth it!! I, unlike most reviewers, enjoyed "Santaland Diaries" the least, I really liked "Greetings to our family and friends", "Based on a true story", and "Christmas Means Giving"! You definatly have to have a sense of humor when reading this book and don't take the stories too seriously (especially "Christmas Means Giving"!) But all in all the book really humored me and I enjoyed reading it!

Immediately before reading this I had read "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and loved it so much I thought I'd pick this up. It just happened to be the holidays so this seemed a natural choice. I was very disappointed.

Four of the six entries here are fictional which halps make his biographical essays that much more believeable. The "Santaland Diaries" is decent. There are funny parts but the diary aspect of it makes it choppy and I have found his humor best when he controls the flow of the story rather than cutting together some events.

The other biographical essay here is "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" which I found the best essay here but is what I would call the literary version of a b-side.

By the end I found that I was enjoying the entries so little I was skipping large chunks hoping to get to a good part.

After my first book from David Sedaris I was eagerly looking forward to another one. After this I'm not so sure.

I read somewhere that this was a good book to read if you are just starting off with Sedaris. I don't know if that is true, since I have never read any other Sedaris books other than this. But I will say that now that I read this one, I want to read them all. I read a lot of reviews saying that this book was hilarious. It was not hilarious - not all of it. There were a lot of parts that are very funny for their honesty; and others that are funny but not in that 'HAHA' way. Mostly I was just charmed by Sedaris' writing style and stories. No matter how strange the situations are - and believe me, some of them are really strange - he finds a way to make them relate-able.

To call David of Sedaris's sense of humor unique, might be an understatement. In "Holiday's on Ice." David delivers his wicked black humor with a Christmas theme that will doubtfully ever translate into a classic made for TV movie. These are certainly not heart warming, life affirming tales to read in front of the fire place with a nice glass of eggnog. To Sedaris, Christmas is an odd assortment of disgruntled department store elves, ..., tv executives, and suburbanites struggling with the "true" meaning of Christmas. "Give until it bleeds."
As always Sedaris uses his unique viewpoints, and sometimes personal experiences to create rich and creative stories. "Holidays on Ice" is a collection of his finest holiday based stories. While not as involving and complete as "Naked," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day." "Holidays On Ice" is a nice Sedaris for beginners book. Stories like "Santa Land Diaries,"
and "Dinah, The Christmas Whore" are as involved, and as well told as any other story in his longer works. "Holidays on Ice" proves once again that David Sedaris is one of the finest Humorists, and all around story tellers in America today.

As long as you don't expect a plot, because there is none. Still, it was fun to read. My first Sedaris book. Didn't surprise me to find out he's from Binghamton, NY, also the hometown of Rod Serling. Weird stuff comes out of that town.

I found each story very intriguing and funny. It is interesting to see how David's life changes with exposure to fame, some money and a good companion. And yet... David seems to not change at all in his essential self.

It was particularly amusing to read his view of Japan. I have spent a lot of time there, and found his views both irreverent and gentle at the same time. All I can say is that I hope he finds other excuses to live in other countries sometime soon.

Being a huge fan of Sedaris' laugh-out loud work, I must admit that I was a bit disappointed with Holidays on Ice. Although this collection of short stories, some fictional, some not, starts out on a great note with "The Santa Land diaries," the humor quickly dries out with "Season's Greetings," and "Christmas Means Giving." Overall, his autobiographical work is much more entertaining than the far-fetched humor he tries to convey in his fictional work.

Overall, I found this book good only as a travel companion and as a light read to get you in the mood for the holiday season. Aside from "Santa Land diaries," don't expect to be rolling with laughter, for the humor in the other stories reeks of Saturday Night Live or MadTV. However, do not be discouraged by this book if this is your first encounter with Sedaris; his other material is much more original and manifest much more shock value than can ever be found here. I would recommend starting with "Naked," or "Me Talk Pretty One Day" to avoid getting a bad first impression from his work.

David Sedaris is a witty author who writes essays that can be simultaneously humorous and disturbing.
This collection of stories confirms this impression, and they are loosely autobiographical, and sometimes veer into the purely fictitious. "Santaland Diaries" falls in the first category as the humble author writes "I am a thirty-three-year-old man applying for a job as an elf." He writes about the dark side of a full time elf job, selecting his elf name of "Crumpet", donning a green velvet elf suit, and seeing things in Santaland that no living person would ever care to see.
An elf with a handle bar mustache hitting on the moms, a child peeing on fake snow. Dark, yes.
In "Let It Snow", he writes of being locked out of his house with his siblings on the fifth day of a snowstorm, as his mom suffered a "little nervous breakdown" and enjoyed drinking wine while the children desperately clammered to get in the house, eventually faking a death to get inside.
"Season's Greetings" is a family holiday season newsletter, which starts with desperate circumstances and goes on methodically listing a crescendo of catastrophes; the perfect antidote to those sweet bragging holiday letters we all have received, and maybe, even written.
Mr. Sedaris either works for you or not. You get to choose.

First let me admit, I find Sedaris very uneven. Some of his pieces go whizzing by me, and I fail to see the humor. Others are so perfect that I can't believe it's the same guy. (For instant he had a recent completely hilarious and brilliant piece on NPR about being forced to take guitar lessons. What's that from?) I got this collection after I heard that piece and the one about being a Macy's elf felt like the same genius. It's the jewel in the cvrowd here. Others, though, I couldn't finish reading. So take your chances here and take your pick. My guess is there is SOMEthing for almost anyone.

So far I have only read, "Me Talk Pretty" by this author and I can say that it was one of my favorite books! I had never laughed out loud so hard at a book before. That book left me very eager to read another one of Sedaris books and over the holidays I picked up "Holidays on Ice" - - If you are looking for something to cheer you up during the stressful holiday times, pick up this little book by Sedaris. It's short but full of great short stories that will have you chuckling out loud!

Now, while I have heard a number of good things about David Sedaris' books, I have never actually read one before. Despite this, I was pretty excited about reading 'When You Are Engulfed in Flames', and I was not disappointed. Sedaris' newest book is a very funny collection of essays about ordinary everyday events in his life, or at least ordinary for him. All the stories in his book feel almost intertwined, possibly because they all to build up to a realization, almost like lessons he learned over time. Whether it is his realization that country spiders don't survive well in the city, or Sedaris eventually learning what makes one of his neighbors tick, Sedaris is very good at building a story over time. He can look at a number of events at different times and places, and see how he came to a better understanding because of these seemingly unrelated events. He also tends to make the simplest things seem more fun and exciting, such as quitting smoking. Not many people would decide to temporarily move across the world just to quit smoking. I think, in the end, David Sedaris is just skilled at comedy and story-telling in general. After all, isn't comedy just making the mundane amusing?

This was the first David Sedaris book that I had ever run across. I didn't know anything about it, or him, when I picked it up - it just looked like an interesting, light read. I couldn't have enjoyed it more! What great stories and his delivery and writing style is unmatched! Since that fateful day I have read every Sedaris book I can find! I recommend them to everyone! This book is still my favorite. I re-read it every year for the holidays and I recommend that you do too!

I've loved Sedaris' essays in the past. His ability to mix the poignant and hilarious in a brilliantly unique voice has always captivated me.

But with this book, while the well-honed voice is still there, the depth and rawness (the heart?) were gone. It was as if he had run out of things to say, but couldn't stop talking.

One of his best tools has always been the lacerating way that he writes about those around him, and in the process reveals more about himself than his subjects. But I found myself wondering if perhaps he had hurt too many loved-ones with his previous books, and was trying to minimize the damage to his personal life this time around.

Attempting to find replacement material, he tries to write bitingly about people like taxi drivers and airplane passengers, but the contact is too brief to result in anything but roughed out charactures.

These essays come across as a set of cocktail-hour anecdotes. Well-polished anecdotes.

I had the pleasure of listening to Sedaris during his debut on NPR many years ago, and his books have been at least as funny as his reading. I own all of his books, and read and reread them to myself and to friends. Except this one. It's a real disappointment.
It seems the author has gotten too comfortable with life. His stories aren't as funny as the ones recounted in previous books, and the only "keeper", in my opinion, is the title story.
I have no desire to read this to others, and don't want to loan it, figuring anyone who has heard this guy was funny will never bother to read his stuff again following exposure to it.
Sedaris needs to get back on drugs, work in an orchard, get chased by a drunk in a truck with a pistol. His life seems to be one of leisure, too comfortable in his relationships, living circumstances, and his pants. David, get naked again, sit on a towel, and write something meaningful. this stuff makes me want to inhale solvents. Not to enjoy, but to forget.

While all of the stories and essays in Holidays on Ice are good, the standout is clearly "The Santaland Diaries". I always think that if I laugh out loud while I'm reading something, then that by itself makes the book worth the price of purchase. I actually had to put the story down till I pulled myself together enough to resume reading it. "The Santaland Diaries" is a glimpse at our own attitudes and behavior during "the festive holiday season". Perhaps it is a clicheed sentiment (if a cynical opinion can be sentimental), but it is true that during the one time of the year when we should be celebrating peace and love for our fellow man, we behave like looters and scavengers in an orgy of mass consumption, ready to slit the throat of anyone who we percieve is trying to interfere with our quest to have a picture taken with a guy in a Santa suit. Sedaris illustrates this with biting humor and, of course, fiction is never as funny as what happens in real life. By the way, I'm pretty sure the story in "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" actually happened too. Besides, I just love a story with a good whore in it.

It would appear many of stories are somewhat based off the authors life. Some of the stories are just sarcastic takes on society and how people act though. I liked this book, the first of the authors I had ever read. I was compelled to make my purchase after hearing the author on NPR giving an interview and reciting a few paragraphs from the Santaland story. I wasn't disappointed. If you like to l laugh and think, this is for you. It probably helps to be a bit jaded and appreciate a darker humor.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is filled with more of David Sedaris's essays on pretty much anything that crosses his mind. From his neighbor Helen to the boil on his lower back to wanting to see the dingo at the zoo. Sedaris dwells on his inadequacies to the point of sleep (the reader's). There are some humorous moments, but Sedaris focuses on the negative too much and the comic relief too little.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a departure from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim in that is focuses more on Sedaris instead of the whole clan, but his writing is as witty and sharp as ever. In this book of essays, Sedaris takes the reader to Japan in his noble attempt to quit smoking. What follows will only have any appreciative Sedaris readers shaking their heads while rolling on the floor in a laughing fit.

One of the things I love most about David Sedaris's work is that one essay can send me running to the bathroom because I'm laughing so hard and the next can move me to tears. Not every essay has had much meaning for me but the majority are far better written than most of what passes for "literature" and best sellers these days. No one else has captured family moments, both poignant and hysterically funny, as well as Mr. Sedaris and I can't wait to see and hear him read his work aloud the next time he is in Ohio.

Sedaris has a talent not only for being hysterically witty, but also for poignancy. Each of his stories in this volume is a perfect package. He's especially mastered his endings; they blew me away, one after the next after the next. Each in a different way. I was fairly astounded that he was able to pull it off in every single story, making his neat little endings pack a punch each time. I feel for the people who don't understand Sedaris' wit and genius, because you're missing out on some universal humor here. He's brilliant.

I anxiously awaited the release of this book. It was worth the anticipation. I was laughing and giggling, and the kids were begging me to let them read it! No way! David Sedaris is his usual strange and interesting self. Full of honest observations about himself and others he loves, this book is hilarious and poignant. Very moving and Sedari as his best.

Disclaimer: Me Talk pretty One Day is the one that makes me laugh and that I hold all other Sedaris works up to for comparison.

Very short stories, connected by the life of the story teller. Best not read at one time, but picked up for a few minutes between chores.

It helps that I'm an ex-smoker (not a non-smoker), and lived in North Carolina a number of years.

Very funny, loved the writing style, great read. I want Hugh's mother to come visit me.

I've read several of Sedaris's "works" ( can they really be called "works"?? They seem more like play...) and got this latest book on CD for a trip overseas. Imagine the looks of my fellow passengers as I laughed out loud and they didn't know why!!

I especially love the stories from his childhood. He writes of his parents going away for a week and hiring "MRS. PEACOCK" to watch the Sedaris children while they're gone. The minute his parents leave, Mrs. Peacock heads for their bed and lays down and demands the Sedaris children scratch her back - very funny stuff. He has a way of describing people so you can actually visualize them.

Even funnier is the story of "HELEN" - the neighbor he had in New York ( I think ). Helen was a combination of Archie Bunker, Robert De Niro and Roseanne. Sedaris does a wonderful job painting the picture of the world in which he, Hugh and Helen live.

If you hate laughing - then avoid his books like the plague!!

I used to love David Sedaris' books, but in this book he went from edgy funny to plain nasty. First story was okay, but after that was just a guy griping about everything--not funny sarcastic, just plain mean-spirited. Pity. I was looking forward to a good holiday read.

I just discovered David Sedaris on NPR. I was intrigued by his show, so I researched him and found that he has written several books. I picked up the most recent, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and read it within two days. His dry wit and sarcasm made me laugh out loud. While most of the essays are very funny, there are a few that aren't as entertaining. All in all, it's a great read for anyone who can see humor in the most disturbing scenarios.

I love David Sedaris' readings on National Public Radio and his occasional written pieces in The New Yorker. Naturally, when I saw his latest collection of stories, I had to have it. David writes about, I guess, the essential and enduring crappiness of people, himself included. In doing so he amuses, but more importantly, reconciles you with your own crappiness. No wonder he's so successful.

Drop this li'l book on the coffee table when the family is over, wait until someone picks it up, and within 5 to 10 minutes expect laughter. The kind of laughter that, even if you're at work, or in church or on a plane, will shake your whole body. Sardonic, wild, socially observant and irreverant, this is the first Sedaris I've read and know now what the interest is about. Really goddamn funny.

I love David Sedaris' work and was looking forward to reading this newest collection of essays. It was disappointing to find that a lot of the essays were from previous books. If you haven't read any of his previous books, you will thoroughly enjoy Sedaris' low key, quirky sense of humor, but if you are a returning fan, you will be disappointed at the "regifting".

My wife brought this book from work and I never heard of the author before. I was immediately taken by the cover. It made me laugh so I decided to read the book. WOW! It led me to the bookstores and to buy ALL of the available titles from this funny author.

I'm shocked that half of the reviewers here gave anything less than five stars. This is by far the funniest book I have read this year. He has a way of describing things in sick details but even that bursts me to laughter every time. Whether he is describing his goofy family or France, this man knows how to tickle each of the funny senses in all of us.

I downloaded this book from the library onto my kindle. I pretty much read anything but I could NOT even get through the first story. I don't know who proofread the kindle edition but I found words repeating and then sentences dropping off not making any sense. If I could give it zero stars, I would. I had no expectations since I have not read from this author before so I guess I wasn't as disappointed as most. I never even got to the baby killing I see people reviewing about. Thank God for that.

While all of the stories and essays in Holidays on Ice are good, the standout is clearly "The Santaland Diaries". I always think that if I laugh out loud while I'm reading something, then that by itself makes the book worth the price of purchase. I actually had to put the story down till I pulled myself together enough to resume reading it. "The Santaland Diaries" is a glimpse at our own attitudes and behavior during "the festive holiday season". Perhaps it is a clicheed sentiment (if a cynical opinion can be sentimental), but it is true that during the one time of the year when we should be celebrating peace and love for our fellow man, we behave like looters and scavengers in an orgy of mass consumption, ready to slit the throat of anyone who we percieve is trying to interfere with our quest to have a picture taken with a guy in a Santa suit. Sedaris illustrates this with biting humor and, of course, fiction is never as funny as what happens in real life. By the way, I'm pretty sure the story in "Dinah, the Christmas Whore" actually happened too. Besides, I just love a story with a good whore in it.

It would appear many of stories are somewhat based off the authors life. Some of the stories are just sarcastic takes on society and how people act though. I liked this book, the first of the authors I had ever read. I was compelled to make my purchase after hearing the author on NPR giving an interview and reciting a few paragraphs from the Santaland story. I wasn't disappointed. If you like to l laugh and think, this is for you. It probably helps to be a bit jaded and appreciate a darker humor.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is filled with more of David Sedaris's essays on pretty much anything that crosses his mind. From his neighbor Helen to the boil on his lower back to wanting to see the dingo at the zoo. Sedaris dwells on his inadequacies to the point of sleep (the reader's). There are some humorous moments, but Sedaris focuses on the negative too much and the comic relief too little.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames is a departure from Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim in that is focuses more on Sedaris instead of the whole clan, but his writing is as witty and sharp as ever. In this book of essays, Sedaris takes the reader to Japan in his noble attempt to quit smoking. What follows will only have any appreciative Sedaris readers shaking their heads while rolling on the floor in a laughing fit.

One of the things I love most about David Sedaris's work is that one essay can send me running to the bathroom because I'm laughing so hard and the next can move me to tears. Not every essay has had much meaning for me but the majority are far better written than most of what passes for "literature" and best sellers these days. No one else has captured family moments, both poignant and hysterically funny, as well as Mr. Sedaris and I can't wait to see and hear him read his work aloud the next time he is in Ohio.

Sedaris has a talent not only for being hysterically witty, but also for poignancy. Each of his stories in this volume is a perfect package. He's especially mastered his endings; they blew me away, one after the next after the next. Each in a different way. I was fairly astounded that he was able to pull it off in every single story, making his neat little endings pack a punch each time. I feel for the people who don't understand Sedaris' wit and genius, because you're missing out on some universal humor here. He's brilliant.

I anxiously awaited the release of this book. It was worth the anticipation. I was laughing and giggling, and the kids were begging me to let them read it! No way! David Sedaris is his usual strange and interesting self. Full of honest observations about himself and others he loves, this book is hilarious and poignant. Very moving and Sedari as his best.

Disclaimer: Me Talk pretty One Day is the one that makes me laugh and that I hold all other Sedaris works up to for comparison.

Very short stories, connected by the life of the story teller. Best not read at one time, but picked up for a few minutes between chores.

It helps that I'm an ex-smoker (not a non-smoker), and lived in North Carolina a number of years.

Very funny, loved the writing style, great read. I want Hugh's mother to come visit me.

I've read several of Sedaris's "works" ( can they really be called "works"?? They seem more like play...) and got this latest book on CD for a trip overseas. Imagine the looks of my fellow passengers as I laughed out loud and they didn't know why!!

I especially love the stories from his childhood. He writes of his parents going away for a week and hiring "MRS. PEACOCK" to watch the Sedaris children while they're gone. The minute his parents leave, Mrs. Peacock heads for their bed and lays down and demands the Sedaris children scratch her back - very funny stuff. He has a way of describing people so you can actually visualize them.

Even funnier is the story of "HELEN" - the neighbor he had in New York ( I think ). Helen was a combination of Archie Bunker, Robert De Niro and Roseanne. Sedaris does a wonderful job painting the picture of the world in which he, Hugh and Helen live.

If you hate laughing - then avoid his books like the plague!!

I used to love David Sedaris' books, but in this book he went from edgy funny to plain nasty. First story was okay, but after that was just a guy griping about everything--not funny sarcastic, just plain mean-spirited. Pity. I was looking forward to a good holiday read.

I just discovered David Sedaris on NPR. I was intrigued by his show, so I researched him and found that he has written several books. I picked up the most recent, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and read it within two days. His dry wit and sarcasm made me laugh out loud. While most of the essays are very funny, there are a few that aren't as entertaining. All in all, it's a great read for anyone who can see humor in the most disturbing scenarios.

I love David Sedaris' readings on National Public Radio and his occasional written pieces in The New Yorker. Naturally, when I saw his latest collection of stories, I had to have it. David writes about, I guess, the essential and enduring crappiness of people, himself included. In doing so he amuses, but more importantly, reconciles you with your own crappiness. No wonder he's so successful.

Drop this li'l book on the coffee table when the family is over, wait until someone picks it up, and within 5 to 10 minutes expect laughter. The kind of laughter that, even if you're at work, or in church or on a plane, will shake your whole body. Sardonic, wild, socially observant and irreverant, this is the first Sedaris I've read and know now what the interest is about. Really goddamn funny.

I love David Sedaris' work and was looking forward to reading this newest collection of essays. It was disappointing to find that a lot of the essays were from previous books. If you haven't read any of his previous books, you will thoroughly enjoy Sedaris' low key, quirky sense of humor, but if you are a returning fan, you will be disappointed at the "regifting".

My wife brought this book from work and I never heard of the author before. I was immediately taken by the cover. It made me laugh so I decided to read the book. WOW! It led me to the bookstores and to buy ALL of the available titles from this funny author.

I'm shocked that half of the reviewers here gave anything less than five stars. This is by far the funniest book I have read this year. He has a way of describing things in sick details but even that bursts me to laughter every time. Whether he is describing his goofy family or France, this man knows how to tickle each of the funny senses in all of us.