The Best American Nonrequired Reading: 2006
Edited by Dave Eggers, Houghton Mifflin, 2006

      What would a new year be without a new Dave Eggers book to enjoy? The book in question is not actually a Dave Eggers book in that it is not a book written by Dave Eggers, but it is almost as good. The Best American Nonrequired Reading: 2006 is a collection of things compiled by Eggers, and, even if he didn’t actually create most of them I think we could say, in the best post-modern sense, that simply by bringing the items together into a book Eggers has committed an act of creation upon them. Indeed, since many of the pieces included in the collection would not even actually exist as pieces had they not been gathered into the book, Eggers can certainly claim authorship of them, at least in a partial sense. This is an Eggers book. Trust me.

      I would be hard pressed to explain what “nonrequired” reading means, but I think that it falls under the general heading of anti-intellectualism, this time of the self-avowedly enlightened variety. Given the introduction by Matt Groening, I’d guess that the collection is aimed at people who believe that you can become wise by watching The Simpsons (see Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You for a book-length explanation of how this is possible). Basically, the book is a collection of pieces that are inarguably cool but which would never be found in any other collection of, you know, writing. They are, therefore, things that would be ignored by the stuffy, out-of-touch literary types who confine their literary tastes to literature. This is stuff you’d read if you were too cool for reading.

      Many of the pieces in The Best Nonrequired Reading are not actually writing, although you will be required to read in order to consume them. “The Best American Fake Headlines” is a list of 46 satirical headlines from The Onion. Like just about everything written in The Onion, they are funny, but like just about everything written by Dave Eggers, they are overdone. Quite a few of the headlines are not precisely hilarious, and the list could probably have been pared down to 30 headlines or so. Other pieces would not even need to be read at all if Eggers had not gone through the trouble of writing them down; “Best American Daily Show Exchange on the Anniversary of Watergate,” an excerpt from the script of the film Me and You and Everyone We Know, and a transcript of a Julia Sweeney monologue from This American Life stand irrefutably outside the realm of literature, and one would guess they are included here only because Eggers wasn’t asked to edit a volume of The Best American TV and Movie Watching.

      But wait. The cuteness doesn’t stop there. We have lists of the “Best American First Sentences of Novels,”  “Best American New Brand Names” and “Best American New Words and Phrases.” “Best American Things to Know About Chuck Norris” is a list of jokes from a web site that reads like a conversation between high school students that goes on far, far too long. “Best American Things to Know about Hoboes” is a bit of self-conscious eccentricity that is, again, excessive (see the list of 700 hobo names at the end of the piece).

      A post-modern literature anthology would be woefully incomplete without pictures, and this collection is nothing if not woefully complete. “Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea” is a comic strip version of a travel piece about the communist country. By being presented in comic form, the piece manages to be both superficial and edgy. “The Innocents” and “Trauma on Loan” are also comics, the former a movie-style road story, the latter political commentary from The Guardian (which, last time I checked, is a British newspaper, which would make this piece not strictly American, but that restriction doesn’t seem to apply, generally, to books in the Best American series). Finally, Kurt Vonnegut makes his “Here is a Lesson in Creative Writing” appealing to the post-modern crowd by peppering it with graphs.

      Many of the other pieces could accurately be classified as both reading and writing (depending, I guess, on whether you’re a reader or a writer), even though they aren’t literature. Politics was big in 2006, as you might expect, and there’s a lot of it here. The complete text of the Iraqi constitution is here. It’s long and boring, making it a perfect fit for an Eggers project, but you can feel as if you’re doing something important by reading it. There’s also a lengthy excerpt from the blog of a soldier in Iraq; of all the pieces in the book, only this one feels truly significant, and its awkward emotionalism is difficult and moving. On the other hand, there’s Tom Downey’s “The Insurgent’s Tale.” You can tell that when a piece of political feature journalism like this shows up in Rolling Stone that the whole inside-Iraq thing has achieved over-saturation. Things are lighter over at GQ, where George Saunders writes “The New Mecca,” a hip travel piece about Dubai.

      If the whole Middle East/war/terrorism deal is getting you down, never fear. There is other stuff here, too. Judy Bunitz, Rick Moody, Cat Bohannon and a bunch of other writers contribute fiction and journalism. Most of the pieces aren’t about Iraq, although Bohannon’s piece is an extremely gory bit about the guy who casts human corpses in plastic and displays them in museums and galleries.

      The whole collection is capped off by a rambling commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. I can think of no better way to close the anthology. I’m glad I didn’t have to sit through the speech, but I’m sure the kids at Kenyon loved it. So, anyway, there you have it, the best stuff (at least the stuff that, in some way, involved words) that Dave Eggers liked in 2006. Love it or leave it (which happens to be the title of a piece in the collection by David Rakoff, but I’m using the phrase here in a more creative sense).

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