Reviews for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003

The average rating for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003 based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-12-23 00:00:00 Stefania Furuli This is just not as good as its 'best American essays' counterpart. I mean, the good essays are from the New Yorker for a reason. I feel that this book is trying too hard to be quirky that eventually, it really becomes quirky and simply not memorable. I really struggled through the pages, and even the introduction by Zadie Smith is not interesting, ugh. I had had such high hope for this. This year of reading really cannot get any worse for me huh? I think I will just stop reading books for now and start again at the beginning of January 2016. Plenty of magazines I've accumulated throughout the year are waiting. I can't wait to read me some fantasy books next year - my husband bought me the whole set of Games of Thrones and I just bought The name of the wind so they'd better be good. Or I can just read classics books - haven't read one in a while. My husband just bought me a bunch of them too and oh boy, their sizes are just intimidating. Anyway, I've been putting this song on constant repeat mode: Isn't it such a perfectly structured song? :) And this one is not bad either: Isn't JYP a genius? Errr... and good lord, Knock Knock (2015) is horrible but Keanu, I love you still.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-22 00:00:00 Andrew Wyndham 3.5 stars overall Individual ratings: Foreword - Dave Eggars 3 Introduction - Zadie Smith 4 The Guide to Being a Groupie - Lisa Gabriele 2 Things We Knew When the House Caught Fire - David Drury 4 The Pretenders - Chuck Klosterman 4 How To Write Suspense - James Pinkerton 3 Stuff - JT Leroy 4 Saint Chola - K. Kvashay-Bayle 4 I'll Try Anything With a Detached Air of Superiority - The Onion 3 A moderately interesting collection, but more of a mixed bag than I'd expect from anything claiming to be a 'best of' overview. The stand-out stories were the David Drury, JT Leroy and Kvashay-Bayle, respectively about the prejudices expressed against a family that doesn't fit in an exclusive community, a homeless girl findng unexpected artistic comfort and a young teenage Muslim girl coming to terms with her place in American society just before the Iraq war. Chuck Klosterman's reportage on the modern phenomenon of the tribute band was funny and insightful, and Zadie Smith intro was an excellent little essay on finding a balance between required and experimental reading, as well as finding one's voice as a writer. Both the Onion piece and the James Pinkerton story were vaguely amusing but rather slapstick in their approach to satire while Lisa Gabriele's tale of a rebellious teenage girl read like a college creative writing exercise. Both this and 'Saint Chola' used a second person narration, but here it seemed somehow to distance rather than include the reader. There was something oddly backward-looking about this collection on the whole; all the fiction or memoirs dealt with looking back to childhood or adolescence, while Klosterman's piece is partly about nostalgia and the Onion's oddly old fashioned - although possibly as it is a satire of those awful New Yorker articles that do actually read like that. I also have the 2004 collection, so am interested to see how that compares.