Pretentious and Condescending

I may be the only one, but I find a lot of nonfiction (mainly the personal essay variety) to be pretentious or condescending. I also don't like to read something where I feel the author is on the defensive. It just puts me in a weird mood.

Because of that, I really didn't care for "Take, Eat" by Tessa Meyer Santiago. I am sure that her feelings are very important to her, and I understand where she is coming from (I think) but the style of the writing and the tone. UGH! It just really bothered me. I wanted to be like "quit whining!" Then again, I may be a terrible person.

I also hated reading "Do We Secretly Envy the Childfree?" Hmmm, maybe? Or maybe still, we don't give the childfree a single thought because it doesn't matter to us or impact our lives at all. 

I found the travel writings to be a little pretentious. 

I will say the only one that I LOVED was reading "Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris. I found this to be incredibly funny and very well written. He wasn't preaching to me, there didn't seem to be an agenda, it was just a story to entertain and it happened to be true. 

This is the part where I actually laughed and woke up my poor husband.

"Twenty-two thousand people came to see Santa today, and not all of them were well behaved. Today, I witnessed fistfights and vomiting and magnificent tantrums. The back hallway was jammed with people. There was a line for Santa and a line for the women's bathroom. And one woman, after asking me a thousand questions already, asks: Which is the line for the women's bathroom? And I shouted that I thought it was the line with all the women in it. And she said: I'm going to have you fired.
I had two people say that to me today: I'm going to have you fired. Go ahead, be my guest. I'm wearing a green velvet costume. It doesn't get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I'm going to have you fired, and I want to lean over and say: I'm going to have you killed."