The Best Nonrequired Reading 2008
Self-proclaimed short story month , post number 5. Okay, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 is not a short story, nor is it a collection of short stories. There are stories in it, and I’ll come back to some of them in a second. In all, I liked this book okay, but it’s the type of book I became particularly interested in. The first 50 pages or so of the 2008 edition are filled with “Best American” whatevers , from dog names to (really funny) Facebook group names to amusing things a man called David Horwitz is willing to do for money. I enjoyed those. Then comes the rest: essays, short stories, articles. Something that kept me going briskly was how you didn’t know exactly what kind of text you were alighting on. You may have just finished an article about Clinton and here comes a short story, followed by a journalistic piece. There are no genre-based sections or headnotes, so you’re on your own to figure it out as you go. That I liked. There are seven short stories in a...