Avast! Ye Sedaris fans

Peter Moore: I have a confession to make.

Karin Winegar: If this involves you, a bottle of Jack Daniel's and a small woodland animal, I don't want to hear about it.

PM: No, it's just this: I'm not sure how I feel about David Sedaris.

KW: I'm sure he'll be crushed to hear that.

PM: I mean, here I am, about to review his new collection of comic essays, tens upon tens of eager readers breathlessly awaiting my thumbs up or down, and I find myself feeling pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. How about you?

KW: I'm probably not the person to ask. Lately I've been working my way through Patrick O'Brian's seafaring novels, and I get a little resentful about being pulled away from Lucky Jack Aubrey and the War of 1812 during a reconnaissance mission on a sloop in the Baltic Sea off the cost of Prussia.

PM: Heave to for just a minute, OK? I think Sedaris writes pretty well, and while I somewhat enjoy his off-kilter take on ordinary things, I also find him a little too self-absorbed to be really interesting. My impulse is to damn the book with faint praise and use such words as "amusing" and "humorous," maybe even "witty," but not the big guns such as "hilarious" or "brilliant" or even "charming."

PM: You have the attention span of a ferret, you know that? Now focus.

KW: Fine. I think he's best when he's not writing about himself. There's a good essay in here, "What I Learned," a sharp send-up of status and higher learning that made me laugh out loud. I also liked the story about the horrible hillbilly baby sitter with the monkey's-fist backscratcher and how Sedaris and his four sisters took notes on her.

PM: Agreed. But I got weary of all the self-deprecation and the perhaps unintentional portrayal of himself as a frail, put-upon, smart darling. I'm glad he survived an obviously difficult childhood, and the fact that he's now by his own description a neurotic, gay, middle-aged recovering addict could be great comic fodder, but somehow it isn't; to me he just seems gloomy and morose -- Eeyore with a penchant for a well-turned phrase.

KW: Sedaris confesses that he is "afraid of everyone and everything" and has fashioned a very successful career out of low self-esteem, helplessness and his urban-dweller hypochondria -- but we've seen this before. In his opening rant, "It's Catching," someone's mother gets guinea worm and his reaction is one of chauvinism and fastidious horror: "If I was a child and saw something creeping out of my mother's leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption. I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting." Maybe that's funny, maybe not. Sedaris is good in his genre, but just not as funny as Paul Rudnick or Terry Pratchett, if I must read something besides O'Brian.

PM: Unfair. That's like saying chocolate is better than vanilla; it's just a matter of taste. Sedaris is undeniably a skilled comic writer, and if you've enjoyed his previous books, you no doubt will enjoy this one, too. I just wasn't crazy about it.

PM: Oooh -- now you're talking.