Theft by Finding
Diaries (1977-2002)
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4.4 • 275 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of the most anticipated books of 2017: Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, New York's "Vulture", The Week, Bustle, BookRiot
An NPR Best Book of 2017An AV Club Favorite Book of 2017A Barnes & Noble Best Book of 2017A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee
David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.
For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences.
Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is the story of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.
Written with a sharp eye and ear for the bizarre, the beautiful, and the uncomfortable, and with a generosity of spirit that even a misanthropic sense of humor can't fully disguise, Theft By Finding proves that Sedaris is one of our great modern observers. It's a potent reminder that when you're as perceptive and curious as Sedaris, there's no such thing as a boring day.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
If you want to read about David Sedaris’ hopes and dreams, look elsewhere. In this collection of diary entries, the famous essayist and humorist trains his dry, self-effacing wit on his bad habits, lousy jobs, and chalk-hurling French teacher. While Sedaris’ exploits aren’t always funny—in his twenties he struggled to find the right balance of quaaludes and meth—the way he writes about them is. This ability to extract humor from even the most embarrassing incidents is his best survival tool, as well as the book's most rewarding lesson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This American Life and New Yorker humorist Sedaris (Naked) displays the raw material for his celebrated essays with these scintillating excerpts from his personal journals. Sedaris collects entries stretching back to his penniless salad days working odd jobs (apple picker, construction worker, house cleaner, a now-famous stint as a Christmas elf), hanging out at the International House of Pancakes and wrestling half-heartedly with drink and drugs. He moves on to his breakthrough as a memoirist and playwright and then to later embroilments and obsessions, including a fixation on feeding flies to pet spiders. Here as elsewhere, Sedaris is a latter-day Charlie Chaplin: droll, put-upon but not innocent, and besieged by all sorts of obstreperous or menacing folks. The frequent appearance of colorful weirdos spouting pithy dialogue may strike some readers as unlikely to be entirely true. But Sedaris's storytelling, even in diary jottings, is so consistently well-crafted and hilarious that few will care whether it's embroidered.
Customer Reviews
Good but not great--Sedaris fans will enjoy.
In the beginning the reader gets a real look inside the daily life of Sedaris before he became famous. There is shift in the honesty of his journaling as his literary career begins to climb in real life, his journal reads more like a blog or a published author taking notes for his next book. I'm always a fan of Sedaris and this did not disappoint but I gained more insight from the beginning years. As the years get newer, the stories get older (based on stories already included in his other published books).
A great debut to iBooks
I’ve never been much of a fan of digital copies of literature, mostly because I enjoy the feeling of hardcovers or satisfaction of seeing the pages I’ve finished reading.
However, sedaris’s diary excerpts were just the right little revues I’d need throughout my day when I had downtime between coffee lines and rides around town.
I’d highly recommend this to any avid Sedaris fan—great insight to David’s world as he finds his literary voice.
Disappointing
When you patiently wait for the next David Sedalia book and all you get are diary entries.