A friend, feeling that my sense of humor would appreciate such a thing, loaned me a copy of Holidays On Ice by David Sedaris.  I’ve heard quite a bit about Sedaris, but I’ve never had the pleasure of reading his work.  Holidays On Ice did not fail to delight.

An exceptionally quick read, this book is a collection of mostly previously published material.  It contains both fiction and nonfiction alike, and at times I seriously couldn’t be sure to which genre some stories belonged.  This ambiguity made things all the more fun.

Sedaris takes a rather sarcastic approach to how people treat Christmas, and while it may seem snotty and cynical, I found it painfully accurate in many cases, especially if you read between the lines.

While I wouldn’t consider Sedaris as skilled a writer as McCarthy or Chabon in terms of technique, he certainly knows how to convey his humor through the written word, and I believe such aptitude is incredibly rare.  He is one of the few writers I’ve ever experienced who had me literally laughing out loud as I read.