Product Description

Santaland Diaries collects six of David Sedaris's most profound Christmas stories into one slender volume perfect for use as a last-minute coaster or ice-scraper. This drinking man's companion can be enjoyed by the warmth of a raging fire, the glow of a brilliantly decorated tree, or even in the back seat of a police car. It should be read with your eyes, felt with your heart, and heard only when spoken to. It should, in short, behave much like a book. And oh, what a book it is!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16287 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
'This is a man who could capture your heart and lift your spirits while reading out the ingredients of a rice cake.' Observer 'His best, funniest, most satisfying book.' Time Out 'Sedaris writes with a gentle but unfailing acuity and a keen eye for t

About the Author
David Sedaris lives in Paris. Raised in North Carolina, he has worked as a housecleaner and most famously, as a part-time elf for Macy's. He is a regular contributor to Esquire and Public Radio International, and his essays have been featured in The New Yorker and Harper's.

Customer Reviews

Sheds a new brighter but more revealing light upon christmas
To summarize: would be impossible, this is a book of pure lunacy blended with humour but combined with Santa's elves and a overall realistically jolly feel(especially when read in December). It proves the best of a even a Humbug leaving you to not only giggle under the bed sheets at night, but you will also begin to notice a new side to Christmas, a commercial yet Fun side, and so every time you walk past that shop window every Christmas seeing the mechanical toys and people dressed in green tights, I promise you will chuckle remembering a great book.

The Santaland Diaries is the same as Holidays on Ice!
This is such a great book, David Sedaris never fails to make me laugh out loud on the tube! However, learn from my mistake - I asked for both The Santaland Diaries and Holidays on Ice for Christmas and it turns out they're exactly the same book, just with different titles, so don't buy both!

Not the best example of his writing
I have read and enjoyed other books by David Sedaris which is why I bought `Santaland Diaries' which is short book made up of a couple of typical memoir-type stories and a couple of short pieces of fiction:

`Santaland Diaries' recalls the time Sedaris spent as an elf during one Christmas at Macy's. Sedaris puts his own spin on the revolting stream of families coming to visit Santa and how he attemped to make life more interetsing for himself during his time in this mind-numbing job! (I especially enjoyed his thoughts about those families who insist of photographing and video taping every minute of the `experience')

`Season's Greeting's to Our Friends and Family!!!' is a pastiche of a round-robin letter (probably more common in America) that has a dark twist and I felt was one of the weakest of the stories, along with the next piece `Dinah, the Christmas Whore,' which seemed like a bit of a filler.

`Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,' was better and was written as if a theatre critic was writing a serious critique of nativity plays. There were some seriously funny lines in this story;
`Pointing to an overstuffed crate that served as a manger, one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed, `A child is bored.'
Yes, well, so was this adult.'

`Based on a True Story' was a short piece written as if a television executive was giving a sermon. More great one-liners.

Lastly the collection includes, `Christmas Means Giving' another great piece of black humour.

I quite enjoyed the time spect reading this (very) short collection but I couldn't really work out why it had been released on it's own. The stories were all loosely based on Christmas but didn't leave me feeling Christmassy and weren't the best examples of Sedaris's writing. If you haven't read anything by him before, you might be better off giving this one a miss and reading `Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denin' instead.

Ok, just not great.