Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls

by David Sedaris
Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls cover
Good Books rating 3.12
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  • ID: 3203
  • Added: 2025-10-17
  • Updated: 2025-10-17
  • Reviews: 4
Reviews
whatisthatbookabout.com · Unknown · 2014-06-08
brilliant 4.50

David Sedaris's 'Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls' is a collection of humorous and insightful essays that blend mischief with beauty. The essays cover a range of topics, from societal changes to personal experiences, showcasing Sedaris's unique ability to captivate readers with his wit and self-deprecating humor.

David Sedaris is a comedic genius whose writing strikes a perfect balance between mischief and beauty. His essays are filled with striking moments and vivid storytelling, making them both hilarious and profound. In 'Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls', Sedaris covers a wide range of topics, from societal changes to personal experiences, all while maintaining his signature wit and self-deprecating humor. One of the standout essays, 'Understanding Understanding Owls', showcases his ability to capture a modern romance and make astute remarks on human miscommunication. Sedaris's essays are about life and its complexities, family dynamics, and ultimately, love. His writing is so engaging that readers can easily get lost in his stories, wondering where the time has gone.

Quick quotes

    David Sedaris is a comedic genius.

    Sedaris has a way with characterization; he allows us to know his characters — each detail that he notices, he shares with his reader.

    My favorite essay in the bunch has to be, “Understanding Understanding Owls”.

theguardian.com · Unknown · 2013-04-27
good 3.50

David Sedaris' latest essay collection, 'Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls,' blends his signature quirky observations with less successful fictional monologues. The best essays offer humorous insights into bizarre topics, leading to surprisingly moving conclusions about love and personal growth.

David Sedaris' eighth collection of essays, 'Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls,' returns to his trademark style of blending humor and personal reflection. The book includes a mix of his usual witty observations and new fictional monologues, which are less successful. The best essays in the collection delve into unusual topics, such as taxidermied owls and swimming in highly chlorinated pools, ultimately leading to profound insights about love and self-esteem. Sedaris' travel essays also provide a humorous look at his experiences with foreign languages and cultures, highlighting both the absurdity and the beauty of his journeys. While the fictional monologues fall flat due to their exaggerated characters, the personal essays shine with their unique blend of humor and depth, making this a worthwhile read for Sedaris fans.

Quick quotes

    Sedaris, who's been accused of sometimes straying from the strictly factual in his personal narratives, branched out to flat-out fiction in his last book, 'Squirrel Meets Chipmunk' (2010), hilarious fables that trenchantly mined the animal kingdom for insights into human behavior.

    In one of these monologues, 'I Break for Traditional Marriage,' a man murders his wife, son and mother-in-law when he hears that gay marriage has been approved, commenting, 'This might sound inexcusable, but if homosexuality is no longer a sin, then who's to say that murder is?

    The best Sedaris essays, on the other hand, crack you up with their wacky observations about bizarre things — taxidermied owls and Pygmies, the bliss of colonoscopy sedation — before improbably working their way around to surprisingly moving conclusions about the nature of love.

goodreads.com · Unknown · 2013-04-23
disappointing 1.00

The reviewer found the book to be a disappointment, feeling it was meaner, cruder, and less funny than Sedaris' earlier works. They criticized the book for being self-absorbed and unfunny, with topics that were inherently unfunny used as punch lines.

The reviewer usually enjoys David Sedaris' work, particularly when he talks about his family or childhood memories. However, they found 'Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls' to be a letdown. The book's primary theme seemed to be the struggles of a successful author, which the reviewer found tiresome. They also felt that the book was meaner and cruder than Sedaris' earlier works, with topics like teen suicide and cancer being used as punch lines. The reviewer was left feeling that the book was humorless, bitter, and offensive, and not at all funny or insightful.

Quick quotes

    Although this book gave me a few chuckles, some topics are inherently unfunny, although Sedaris uses them as punch lines: teen suicide, cancer, ingestion of human feces, eye socket sex. Yuck.

    _Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls_ is a disappointment because it is so much meaner and cruder--not to mention less funny--than earlier Sedaris books.

    I don't even rate nonfiction, but I'm making an exception for this... _thing_ that reads like the inane, self-absorbed ramblings of a Grampa Simpson type - 'when I was young...

npr.org · Unknown · 2013-04-17
brilliant 3.50

David Sedaris's latest collection of autobiographical essays is a mix of brave and cruel, showcasing his contempt for the ordinary and his unique perspective on life. The book is filled with hilarious lines and moments of sincerity, but also contains some unnecessarily vicious humor that feels out of place.

David Sedaris's latest collection of autobiographical essays is a journey through his unique perspective on life. The book is filled with hilarious lines and moments of sincerity, but also contains some unnecessarily vicious humor that feels out of place. Sedaris's particular kind of alienation and contempt for the ordinary is evident throughout the collection. He captures the sense of loss and disappointment that many people experience, but also reveals a joy at being alive. The best essay in the collection is 'Loggerheads', which starts with a beautiful moment of witnessing majesty and ends with a story of loss and unraveling. However, some of the skits in the book feel unnecessarily vicious and the humor curdles. Overall, the book is a brave and clever work that showcases Sedaris's brilliance as a writer.

Quick quotes

    Brave and cruel by turns, David Sedaris's latest collection of autobiographical essays is the work of a comic writer with a contempt for the ordinary.

    Silliness here is frequently served with a side dish of regret, or disappointment, or tenderness.

    This is brave work, nevertheless. Not because his own life and those of his friends and relatives are mined for material — plenty of writers take pleasure in that. Sedaris is brave because he has no vanity at all, no compunction about revealing himself as weak and obsessive, sometimes cruel and hateful.

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