When novelist Dave Eggers kick-started THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING anthologies in 2002, I was initially elated. Here was a kitchen-sink smattering of fiction and nonfiction culled from publications both mainstream and anything but. Exciting!
Two years later, I had given up on the annuals because of their bent toward the crushingly pretentious. While the first book had a good mix of the serious and the not-so-serious, by 2004, virtually all the contents comprised one big downer. After a breather, I returned to take a look at THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2009.
Did I like what I saw?
Yes. And no.
One good thing the annual has done in my absence is open with a section of short lists. Everyone loves lists, and these provide a shot in the arm to the reader, delivering a dose of fun right off the bat, from the year’s best bank heists and Craiglists postings to an absurd (and absurdly funny) comic about hair.
Some 50 pages later, the main feature begins. There’s a touching tribute to the late David Foster Wallace by friend Jonathan Franzen. Amelia Kahaney ponders the sex life of a temp in her office. David Grann reports on Frédéric Bourdin, a 30-year-old man who impersonated children. (It’s the book’s best piece, which shouldn’t be surprising, since it comes straight from THE NEW YORKER.)
But that’s about all I can recommend. Too many other articles take too long to get to their point, if they have one at all. Yes, these people can write, but can they make a connection to the reader? It would help if the individual contributions were labeled as fiction or nonfiction, to get us in the correct frame of mind; many times, it’s too difficult to tell, making them ever the more pretentious. For a book that prides itself on being “nonrequired,” it more often than not feels like an assignment.
In the end, NONREQUIRED READING is like that person you know who loves to hear himself or herself talk: He or she may have something interesting to say, but it gets lost in all the unnecessary fluff surrounding it. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS SERIES:
• THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING 2005 edited by Dave Eggers
Related posts:
- The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005
- The Best American Comics 2009
- The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup
- BOOKGASM’s Guide to Summer Reading for Summer Movies 2009
- Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form
