The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 Paperback – October 10, 2007

This is a very interesting book. I cannot say that I liked every piece in it, but they all made me think. I enjoyed many of the pieces. Some were true stories, and others showed truths thru fiction. There were many very different pieces in the book.This is NOT a book for children. It is full of adult themes. I found it was not a book to read when I was sad to start with. many of the pieces hold some of the more depressing truths of mankind's society. There were also some funny places, and a few uplifting places. However, I found I could not predict what a story or essay would bring me in advance.I believe there was some cursing, but it was so much part of the pieces it was in that I cannot even remember the cursing clearly. Some of the pieces were about very poor people living in stark places. Some of them will be with me for a very long time.I found this to be a very unusual book, and I would recommend it to almost any adult. Particularly if you want to expand your mind. .Most of the pieces were fairly short, so there are many to choose from. I love the fact that part of the price goes to support literacy and education! Please consider buying it.I hope this review will help you. I apologize for it not being as clear as some of my reviews, but this book is very hard to quantify. I hope you find the book as interesting as I did.

This is the first edition of Nonrequired Reading that I've read, but it won't be the last. I really enjoyed it. The only problem is the reading is so varied. There were a couple stories I skimmed over because the topic didn't really interest me, but the really good stories made up for it. There were two graphic short stories, which I really enjoyed. I teach middle school and flirted with the idea of sharing them with my students, but in the end felt the subject matter was too mature for them. Most of the reading would be more appropriate for college-level reading. There was one article in which scientists wrote about what that thought was real, but could not prove. That had to be my favorite because it really blew my mind. Also, a great article on Dubai, a place I'll probably never get to visit, but wish I could.Great reading. Since I own it, I can see myself picking it up again in a few years and rereading. One of the reviewers said this was their least favorite edition. If that is true, I can't wait to read the others because, to me, this edition was pretty solid.

Whenever I read a Best of Series book, only a few stories/essays grab me, and this is the eclectic nature of anthologies. In Best-of books all writing is high quality, but what interests the writer and me is hit and miss.Yet I found almost seventy percent of BNR 2006 excellent. The graphic entries all great, I've read Delisle's Pyongyang, it is up there with Spiegelman's Maus, but the other two I had never heard of and found both very provocative - Joe Sacco & Gipi. The Best American Excerpt from a Military Blog is a tearjerker, and the Chuck Norris Facts as well as the Onion headlines are funny. My prose favorites came from Tom Downey, The Lincoln Group, Julia Sweeney, and Vonnegut. On the questionable end, I'm glad to have the opportunity to read the 26 pages of the Iraqi Constitution, but..., it does not make very compelling reading. And perhaps too many of the essays or excerpts made a one-sided statement about our involvement in the Middle East. This is fascinating stuff, and though Tom Downey's 'The Insurgent's Tale' perhaps is the most provocative piece of the bunch, it also made me wonder why the story seemed unable to come down a little harder, or examine, both sides. I somehow felt the author gave the insurgent a pass at times.Four and a half stars.

Reading Dave Egger's ingratiating and irritatingly self-flattering Foreword to this volume (why is it, even when he's talking about others, that Dave Eggers is always talking about himself?), one hopes desperately that he is being ironic when he says that the pieces in the anthology were selected by a group of high-school students. Unfortunately, he appears to have been telling the truth. This is arguably the worst of the Best American Nonrequired Reading series, though the competition is pretty stiff. Maybe 2005 was just a lousy year for writing. Maybe we shouldn't be expected to pay full price to read stories and essays that appealed to high-school students. Maybe Dave Eggers really can't tell decent writing from drivel. Or maybe all three.I would save exactly two pieces from this book: Aimee Bender's "Tiger Mending" and Stephanie Dickinson's "A Lynching in Stereoscope," both of which are marvelous. The rest of the book ranges from decidedly not marvelous to aggravating, self-referential, and banal. When you get to the last four pieces (Jonathan Tel's "The Myth of the Frequent Flier," Douglas Trevor's "Girls I Know," William T. Vollman's "They Came Out Like Ants," and Lauren Weedman's "Diary of a Journal Reader"), you realize you're deep in the Swamp of Complacencies that is the province of graduate-writing programs and of writers like Eggers and the McSweeney crowd: too clever by half, damn impressed with themselves and, at base, utterly uninterested in readers. Writing, for them, is an essentially masturbatory act that precludes an other.I'd put Beck's Introduction, as superficial and trivial a piece of writing as you'll ever find, into the same category. It is apparently included in BANR 2005 solely for the "cool factor" bona fides that someone like Beck could provide in 2005 and not because Beck has a single intelligent or interesting observation to make about writing. Plus, Beck was about to feature Eggers on his next album, so hey: One hand washes the other, high up there in the Hiposphere. And that seems to be Eggers all over: so doggone determined to be "alternative" that he becomes, numbingly, the same as everything else.

This is the premier annual showcase for the USA's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, the very best pieces are selected from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.I have to say that of all the editions of this collection this was most disappointing - even though there are some notably excellent authors included in it. From the beginning I had to trudge through several difficult to get through works that made me feel like picking up the book to finish it would be a chore and as an avid reader that is never a good thing!!

Absolutely amazing stories.