david foster wallace joseph frank's dostoevsky

Sedaris seems to get more and more lazy, giving us the same old story in new hashings: his crazy family, Hugh, Normandy, Paris…blahblahblah for the third or fourth time. Foster Wallace’s footnotes can be annoying but they can also be ignored or read later, for another hour spent enthralled by the information contained therein. Two conclusions I reached: first, these two writers are opposites in just about everything and second, that David Sedaris is repetitive and has become quite boring, no matter how much I interspersed his works with Foster Wallace’s (or the Sunday comics or Home and Garden or the New York Times Book Review, I was getting desperate to avoid Sedaris), and that Foster Wallace is not repetitive and never boring: I read his essays in huge and satisfying gulps of reading.įoster Wallace was hard working and thorough and wide-ranging in his topics even when he returned to topics previously covered, like tennis or politics, the essays are new in their explorations and conclusions, and in the insight offered.

So over the past two days I switched back and forth between the essays in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (published in 2006) by David Foster Wallace and the ones in When You Are Engulfed in Flames (published in 2008) by David Sedaris.

The thing about most books of single-author essays is that you cannot just sit down and read through the essays without the writing style and/or topics and/or general take on life, becoming very repetitive.

David foster wallace joseph frank's dostoevsky