Review: Barrel Fever

I have long enjoyed David Sedaris's sense of humor. An essay he wrote about an unflushable poo has stayed with me longer than any story about poo should. So on my last airplane ride I picked up Barrel Fever, a collection of stories and essays.

Flying with a toddler did not afford me much time for reading, so it's taken me much longer to get through it. And it only took a few of his short stories for me to realize that I'm actually not a fan of Sedaris's fiction. He seemed more crude than I remember his nonfiction stories being. Or maybe it's harder for me to swallow crudeness when it's made up than when I believe it to have really happened.

Whatever the case, I skipped the rest of the short stories and dove into the essays. Which I enjoyed as much as I remembered enjoying Sedaris. So I recommend his nonfiction, if you get his sense of humor. But save your time by not reading his fiction.

Review: Too Much Happiness

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro is the best contemporary collection of short stories that I've ever read. The title story was the last one and almost long enough to be a novella. Munro wrote it after she discovered Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky and was fascinated her life and her work.

Has any seemingly random figure in history caught your attention and held it? Mine is a woman named Hannah Dustan who lived in the early days of New England. She was kidnapped by Indians, her infant's brains bashed out on a tree in front of her. She later escaped and massacred and scalped her captors--men, women, and children. After she returned home, she was praised and paid for the scalps she took, even though that had been outlawed years before. I read a short story about her in a survey of American Literature class probably eight or nine years ago, but I still occasionally think about Dustan and what drove her to do what she did. What fascinates me most is wondering how she lived the rest of her life and how she felt about her actions years later.