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	• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (The Best American Series) Houghton Mifflin, 2006 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Different brand of humor, but its the kind I like!

I first became a Dave Eggers fan after getting into McSweeney's thanks to an NPR review. I'm actually not retirement age, listening to NPR, but a 20 year old college student. This book is great because I can read it in short spurts, like before class starts, and not really lose the focus of an intense novel. Also, the stories in this edition are truly riveting- the tale of a "freedom fighter", a future "Body Works" corpse- and yet some just make your face light up- the best fake headlines, courtesy of The Onion, random first lines of books. Overall, this is random, but a great cross section of pop culture. Weird? yes. Nonrequired? It's so good, it should be required.

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Some of it is more nonrequired than you may think

This is a good enough read mostly for the fact that you can skip whatever you don't care enough about and read only what peaks your interest. It's even better if you did like me and got it from the library.

The first section is good with all the Onion articles and Daily Show transcript. Then I also enjoyed Julia Sweeney's essay about letting go of God like he was almost an imaginary friend. Also, The Innocents and one or two of the other comics were good. False Cognate as well, was superbly done. And Kurt Vonnegut, c'mon, the man could find something interesting to say about parting your hair, let alone creative writing, which he did know quite a bit about. The best was the diagram of Kafka.

Too many of the stories unfortunately deal with Iraq and the Middle East in general, however, and this is the part I meant when you are able to skip over uninteresting parts. This is no doubtdue to the selection committee is mostly high school area kids from the Bay Area. You take that impressionable age group and you throw in a democratic selection process so everyone gets a say, you're going to wind up with a message along the lines of "Uh, this is like real important to us, man. Cuz". Yeah, you kiddies mean well, but teenagers, if you're going to attempt vague hippie-esque techniques, don't forget the dope, guns, and f'ing in the streets.

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Find new and interesting authors - expand your horizons

This is a great book for those who wish to be exposed to new contemporary authors. I especially enjoyed the story on Dubai by George Saunders, "The New Mecca". If you've never read about Dubai (or even if you have), it's a real treat to hear more about the Fantasyland of the Middle East...

Good stuff

The collection of stories was surprisingly good. I'm not much for compilations like this, but I found myself truly enjoying this one.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

From Dave Eggers: For this year's edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading, we wanted to expand the scope of the book to include shorter pieces, and fragments of stories, and transcripts, screenplays, television scripts -- lots of things that we hadn't included before. Our publisher readily agreed, and so you'll see that this year's edition is far more eclectic in form than previous editions. Along the way to making the book, we also came across a variety of things that didn't fit neatly anywhere, but which we felt should be included, so we conceived the front section, which is a loose Best American roundup of notable words and sentences from 2005. It is, like this book in general, obviously and completely incomplete, but might be interesting nevertheless.

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