Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002

This one starts slow, and doesn't follow the traditional essay structure of Sedaris's other work, but once you get past the first few years (in which he's clearly in the early stages of finding his voice), this book is such a delight. I heard him do a reading from bits of it, or perhaps the next installment, at a theater in Boston, and I was cracking up the whole time. Sedaris has such a knack for pulling the absurd and hilarious out of the everyday; he sees the world as this cast of crazy, but still loveable, characters, and that's a fun frame in which to live one's life. It inspired to me to want to write a similar kind of diary, cataloguing less the thoughts and feelings that plague me, and more the weird joys and oddities in the world and ourselves.