BOOK: When You Are Engulfed In Flames

I love to read but I often find that the time I have for pleasure reading is limited to short intervals, usually less than twenty minutes at a time. This is most likely why I am drawn to short stories. I can digest them in brief moments of leisure and not feel badly if I am not able to pick the book up again for a few days.

Humorist David Sedaris is a genius at composing a short story. He's even better at it when I centers around his own life. All of previous books, ZONINO! worthy in their own right, follow him on adventures as a child in North Carolina with his excentric parents and siblings, in university in Chicago, living in New York City in his twenties, and France as an adult. When You Are Engulfed In Flames is no different.

Filled with fresh stories and misadventures, Sedaris continues to entertain with real-life ridiculous situations and mundane observations of his bizarrely ordinary life. Always using his unique style of story-telling, Sedaris often times begins like a rambling old relative you get stuck sitting with at your family reunion. But you keep listening because you know, if nothing else great uncle old man river with eventually swear or tell you one of your cousin's is adopted; sticking with the aimlessness is always worth it!

One of my favorite vignettes from this collection is a story of how, while on an airplane, Sedaris almost chocked on a throat drop, projecting it with a violent cough into the lap, or more accurately crotch, of his sleeping aisle mate. As Sedaris states in his story, "under normal circumstances" he could have dealt with this awkward situation maturely, the way two adults should. However, before falling asleep the woman sitting next to him had caused a little tiff that the whole plane was privy to. Cue hilarity!

Sedaris's multi-part story, saga really, of how he eventually quit smoking (and drinking and marijuana) is especially humanizing and guffaw-inducing. Reading this book, it is hard not to feel a permanent smile creep across your face. I wonder what people thought of me, the weird smiling guy on the bus, while I was finishing up a quick story on my ride to work?

Sergio del Limónar