Reading Sarah Vowell

Some of you may know Sarah Vowell's work from This American Life or her voice-over work as Violet on The Incredibles. I'm just reading Assassination Vacation, an unusual travelogue. Here's why i love her writing:

Now, a person with sharper social skills than I might have noticed that as these folks ate their freshly baked blueberry muffins and admired the bed-and-breakfast’s teapot collection, they probably didn’t want to think about presidential gunshot wounds. But when I’m around strangers, I turn into a conversational Mount St. Helens. I’m dormant, dormant, quiet, quiet, old-guy loners build log cabins on the slopes of my silence, and then, boom, it’s 1980. Once I erupt, they’ll be wiping my verbal ashes off their windshields as far away as North Dakota.