Definitely Non-Required Reading

Okay, this is the last anthology I’m going to pick up. I’ve had a short attention span recently, so jumping into a short-story before I go to bed has been the only answer. But this one has really put me off. Damn you McSweeeneeeeeeys!

Technically, The Best American Non Required Reading 2006 is not McSweeney’s, but it was edited by Dave Eggers along with a team of high-schoolers from San Francisco tied to his 826 Valencia school program, so ah, well, it’s basically McSweeney’s okay? Do we get that?

I was a fan of McSweeney’s for a while, followed whatever books came out, but gradually I dipped into their website less and less, and finally dropped off altogether. I am still curious about their short-fiction anthologies, as you can see below, but it takes a lot for contemporary short-fiction to get my attention, so that’s been waning too. This is not the first “Non Required Reading” I’ve read– I have found in the past collections some of the best and in someway off-beat stories from the year, culled from regular print journals like Zoetrope to online sources like the Onion. This year’s contains all that but also has broadened its scope to include short graphic works, an inexplicable excerpt from a screenplay (Me and You and Everyone we Know by Miranda July—dreadfully dull) as well as other odd ephemera. But somehow this one was just not right.

So what’s the problem? Well let’s start with the fiction: limp and meandering, and it really failed to convince me of how it got the editors attention in the first place. And the non-fiction selections seem to be chosen not for their quality of the writing but because rather the social importance. Here’s the Katrina story. Here’s David Rakoff yakking off about becoming an American Citizen in post 9/11. Here’s one about Iraq. Here’s a story about losing religion in America. And listen. I fucking hear you. But if you’re putting out a book with Eggers’ name on the cover aren’t you preaching to the choir? Perhaps I’m being too harsh here—but seriously now. All of these would be fine if they were well told—but after the great examples of New Journalism found in Wolfe’s anthology—they just fall flat. The overall tone is reminiscent of the recent skewering of This American Life as done by the Onion—“we couldn’t be more pleased with ourselves.”

So not to be too much of a hater and to save you the trouble of having to do more than flip through this sucker, let me give you the goods. The 3 graphic short stories are all fine, which include aJoe Sacco piece set in the contemporary America about human rights and a really funny little story by Guy Delisle about being working for an animation company under Kim Jong Il in North Korea. George Saunders’ travelogue of Dubai ain’t bad. The collection actually begins with one of it’s best pieces called Shipwreck by Cat Bohannon an odd, poetic investigative journalism piece (if you can imagine such a thing) set in “Plastination City”, aka Dalian, a Chinese factory town that processes the corpses used in the Body Worlds exhibition. It’s really the best thing in the book—really hits on what she thinks we are looking for in the exhibit besides the macabre. And the excerpts from Chuck Norris Facts are still funny. “There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’s beard. There is only another fist.” Maybe 2007 will be a better year… or maybe I’m just out of the demographic for these books now… either way I’m not encouraged to pick up the next volume.