Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I've really enjoyed Best American Non-Required in the past and looked forward to this year's edition. The last few years the series has contained some of the best reading I've come across. But this year's edition is off. While the stories and articles in these books have always been chosen by high school students in Dave Egger's writing programme, the content has always been relevant for a general audience and chosen from a broad range of journals. But the 2007 edition is plainly something that would only appeal to high school students. It's full of banal lists, graphic comics, stories with lines like "The car gleamed throughout the day and into the night as we drank beer purchased from stores that let teenage drivers of gleaming cars buy beer. We drank more beer at each stop, in each new neighborhood:..." This isn't good writing. There are a few good stories in here, but even the stories I liked contained elements which clearly appeal to high school students. "How To Tell Stories to Children" is good, but its central character is coming of age and therefore relateable to the committe that chose it. It's a great story made less appealing by the stories it was collected with.
"What Is Your Dangerous Idea" was a great book, full of bite-sized, provocative essays. Unfortunately Best American Non-Required 2007 copied a dozen or more of these essays for it's pages, filling up about a fifth of the book. I'd like to make some comments about kids in high school padding assignments, but that seems mean. My point is, why buy a book full of another book? If "What is Your Dangerous Idea" was good enough to fill up a sizeable portion of Best American, why not just buy "What is Your Dangerous Idea"? The whole point of being an editor is that you choose the best. One essay from Dangerous would have been appropriate. Dave Eggers and his students need to realise their job is to edit, cull, cut down and give us the cream.
I don't know what happened this year but I am very disappointed. I read the biographies of the students chosen to pick stories this year and they all seem like the kind of kids trying to pad their college applications with lots of superachievements. Maybe these people aren't the best judges of good writing. Maybe too many cooks spoil the pot. Who knows? But whatever the case, Best American Non-Required Reading 2007 is definitely non-required for good reason.
P.S. I liked the introduction by Sufjan Stevens, but the "interview" with Dave Eggers was off-putting. Is anyone else growing tired of his sarcasm? It's so old. New act please.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007
From "Q & A" by Dave Eggers A group of senators and assemblypersons were pressing The Best American Nonrequired Reading on a number of questions relating to the collection, so we decided to kill that stone in the shape of an introduction in the shape of a Q & A.Who are they, the Nonrequired committee's members who decide on things in this collection?They are high school students from all over the San Francisco Bay Area.Are they touched by some kind of divine light?The question is a good one. There is rampant speculation on the subject.Are they all great-looking and charming and well dressed?Yes. All of them, and especially Felicia Wong, who can even make her own clothes.I have a question about the process by which the entries in this collection are chosen. Is it scientific?The process by which The Best American Nonrequired Reading is put together is not scientific. It is whatever one would consider the opposite of scientific.Creationist?Well, no, it's not creationist either. The point is that we are probably a bit less top-to-bottom thorough than, say, the Army Corps of Engineers. Well, actually, scratch that. We are probably about exactly as thorough as the Army Corps of Engineers, in that we are intermittently thorough.What is your opinion and the committee's opinion of the state of short stories and small magazines and other periodicals?This is a good time. It really is.More specifically?Not all of us Americans appreciate the fact that we have about 150 very good quarterlies in this country. Every state seems to have a very good quarterly, and about a hundred colleges have very good quarterlies -- from the Kenyon Review to the University of Illinois's Ninth Letter. So by our estimate there are about 150 very good quarterlies in this country. Maybe more. Now, the thing we don't always appreciate here in America is that elsewhere in the world there are few to no quarterlies.How does it feel to select something for the collection that you found in an unlikely place?It feels so good. This year, for example, at the last moment we found "Humpies" by Mattox Roesch. It was published by Agni Online, and we all loved it, and here it is, ideally able to reach a new audience. We all took pleasure in finding that one; the mandate of the committee is to find the offbeat and the lesser-known and bring these pieces to our readers, most of whom have great skin and bad eyes.
Click here for more information about The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007
0 comments:
Post a Comment