A new David Sedaris book!

There's only one person who writes books that I pick up the first time I see them and buy without even looking inside to see if it's good. That's David Sedaris, whose new book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim appeared yesterday in lots of nice big stacks at Borders. They weren't there the day before. They sprang up overnight. I picked one up immediately and set about to do the shopping that led me into the store in the first place.

I walked up the big central staircase. We have an amazingly large and nice Borders on the west side of Madison, a city that has plenty of people who carp lengthily about businesses that aren't locally owned. My answer re Borders, if I ever engage with this sort of carping, is that I lived and shopped in Ann Arbor back in the days when Borders was the local bookstore. Am I supposed to punish it now for being so good and successful? Let the local business be better and I'll go there. The local University Bookstore has filled up its first floor with T-shirts and sweatpants: they are the ones I chose to punish. On the other hand, I get my coffee on State Street at the locally owned Espresso Royale or (if I want a sandwich) Fair Trade. I walk past Starbucks, not because it's a chain, but because their coffee isn't as good. (They are remodelling it, making it more comfortable somehow, so I'll probably check it out.)

So, as I was saying, I walked upstairs at Borders, and one of the store employees saw I had the new David Sedaris book and said, "He's really funny." I said, "Yeah, I know. He's the one author whose books I buy right away without even looking inside." She said, "That's what everyone says."