Jesse's review of The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 (The Best American Series) by Dave Eggers (Editor)
3.5 stars, actually.
I'm a fan of the Nonrequired Reading series and how the volumes are compiled. Were I a teacher, I'd swipe the idea for my class: encourage students to read and select pieces that speak to them, and then share the best writing with their peers in a book that reflects not only a year in reading, but a year in their lives.
As these volumes are compiled by students, they tend to follow a pattern: there's a piece about the war written by a soldier, an article about what the war is like from the "enemy's" perspective, a story about a mail-order bride, and a commencement speech. You can spot themes across years, but the students, on the whole, pick fascinating pieces for the anthology each year, and 2006 is no exception.
There is the filler: a overly long list of new band names, page after page of first lines of novels published in 2005, a list of headlines from The Onion, and the Iraqi constitution. Yes, it is a historic document, but did the students actual...more
I'm a fan of the Nonrequired Reading series and how the volumes are compiled. Were I a teacher, I'd swipe the idea for my class: encourage students to read and select pieces that speak to them, and then share the best writing with their peers in a book that reflects not only a year in reading, but a year in their lives.
As these volumes are compiled by students, they tend to follow a pattern: there's a piece about the war written by a soldier, an article about what the war is like from the "enemy's" perspective, a story about a mail-order bride, and a commencement speech. You can spot themes across years, but the students, on the whole, pick fascinating pieces for the anthology each year, and 2006 is no exception.
There is the filler: a overly long list of new band names, page after page of first lines of novels published in 2005, a list of headlines from The Onion, and the Iraqi constitution. Yes, it is a historic document, but did the students actual...more
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