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Theft by Finding*, David Sedaris’s diaries from 1977 – 2002, is the funniest book I’ve read in years. Every other page I had to stop and cackle to myself, and then take a picture of a page that made me laugh and send it to a friend. That’s how I survived being stuck in BGC for three hours on Friday the 30th, when the conditions for the perfect traffic jam—Friday, payday, and rain—combined to open a hellmouth where time moved at 1/20th its usual speed.**

Sedaris started keeping a diary in 1977 when he had no direction and no prospects, was dirt poor, took drugs, had sex with strangers, and lived in horrific crime-ridden neighborhoods where non-whites were routinely abused and beaten, women were routinely abused and beaten, and gays were routinely abused and beaten. (Sedaris got extra abuse because he was mistaken for a Jew.) And yet the book is hilarious! The author doesn’t try to be funny, he just recounts his daily humiliations in a deadpan tone that heightens their absurdity. He doesn’t complain about his lot. He doesn’t judge the scum of the earth (I did, by typing this sentence). He is kind to everyone: the mean, scary, ugly, filthy and stupid. We’re all just trapped in this hell, trying to make it out alive.

In the later entries you can see the genesis of his famous essays. However, I am especially fond of the accounts from the bleak years, when he didn’t know that his writing would take him anywhere, and he was just writing because he had nothing else. If you think your life is going absolutely nowhere and you feel like a great big loser, this book will give you perspective.

* Apparently there’s a law in England that says if you pick up something valuable and you don’t report it, you’ve committed theft by finding. It’s the opposite of “Finders, keepers”.
** There were no Grab or Uber cars available, and I could’ve walked home except that there was no sidewalk.

Since Wonder Woman, every Hollywood product that’s opened in cinemas has been garbage (My eardrums are still recovering from the previous Transformers. No, thanks). So for our Sunday movie night we turned to Netflix’s Okja, Bong Joon-ho’s satire about capitalism in general, and the food industry in particular. You might say it aspires to convert viewers to vegetarianism. You can gauge our reaction from the fact that after seeing it, we had crispy pata for dinner.

Maybe I have to be in the right mood for a movie about a super pig who is not named Babe or animated by Miyazaki, but I found it bizarre and not in a fun way. Its critique of capitalism and consumers is timely and should be provocative, but it doesn’t go far enough. It is unwieldy, its whimsy forced, and the laughs presumably lost in translation. It quickly grows tiresome. Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal do some rare terrible overacting, though Paul Dano is oddly romantic as an animal rights activist. The super-pig looks like a hippopotamus. When the conflict is resolved, I thought, “Something they could’ve done in the first ten minutes!” just seconds before Juan said it. If you know Juan, this is an achievement.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is a short novel in which very little seems to be happening, but there is so much tension you cannot believe that that’s all there is. The novel rewards overthinking—everything happens between the lines. Yesterday I saw the BBC adaptation of The Sense of an Ending starring Jim Broadbent, Harriet Walter, Michelle Dockery, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Joe Alwyn (current tabloid fodder) and the great Charlotte Rampling.

The adaptation takes the thrumming tension of the novel and stretches and stretches it until it is as slack and shapeless as the garter of an old man’s shorts. Fine performances, but what for?

See our Reading Group discussion on The Sense of an Ending from 2011.

Note: None of the adorable cats and dogs depicted in this article have eaten their humans. (Shutterstock)

Surely the thought has occurred to you. The simple answer is….

Yes.

Don’t look at them like that. You’ll be dead.

Read it in Big Think.