I've never read (or listened to) anything by David Sedaris, but I've always heard of him being very funny and I decided to finally start checking out some of his stuff on audio. This one was only 3 hours long so I gave it the first priority (I love books I can get through in only a weekend of listening while doing chores!), and it was a moderately fun listen. It's a collection of short stories, each one about different animals who are completely anthropomorphized, so much so that they sound like gangsters from the Bronx or breathless young wives with completely distinctive personalities. Sedaris tells stories that could definitely be about actual people, but making them about animals instead gives him an advantage in that we already have associations with certain animals and characteristics in our minds, like skunks are smelly and rabbits are fast and purebred dogs are snobby, and he is able to use those characteristics for comedic effect by either making his animal characters have or not have those expected characteristics. The stories were sometimes funny, sometimes depressing (in a comedic way) but they all got me thinking and seemed like they could be true to life in a way--like I could imagine people acting like those animals were. I think my favorite story was about the owl who would try to interrogate his prey into getting them to tell him something new that he could learn, and who ends up making friends with a hippo and a gerbil through his adventures (although there was a somewhat gross image about some parasites living in the hippo's rear end, but it wasn't written about crudely in that story). I like Sedaris's writing style (although sometimes it was a little more crude than I prefer, but not usually) and am interested to read or listen to more of his stuff.
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