There's no right way to keep a diary but if there's an entertaining way David Sedaris seems
to have mastered it. If it's navel-gazing you're after you've come to the wrong place ditto
treacly self-examination. Rather his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a
bus a fight between two men on the street collecting Romanian insults or being taken round a
Japanese parasite museum. There's a dirty joke shared at a book signing then a dirtier one
told at a dinner party-lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you
once really hated George W. Bush and that not too long ago Donald Trump was a harmless
laughingstock at least on French TV. Time marches on and Sedaris at his desk or on planes
in fine hotel dining rooms and Serbian motels records it. The entries here reflect an
ever-changing background-new administrations new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you
can say at the start of the book you can't by the end. Sedaris has been compared to Truman
Capote and Tennessee Williams Lewis Carroll and a 'sexy Alan Bennett'. A Carnival of Snackery
illustrates that he is very much his own singular self.
