The best American nonrequired reading 2012

It's incredibly difficult to ever talk about collections like this because by their very nature they are incredibly uneven. This was my first time reading one of these sorts of collections after spending years picking them up in various libraries and bookstores, and I guess I had hoped this would

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be more consistently good than it turned out to be. From the highest of highs (Tenth of December, Beautiful Monsters, The Palace of the People, Tin Man, Redeployment, The Love Act, The Years of my Birth) to the inexplicably terrible (South Beach) to the simply average (Don't Eat Cat, The Street of the House of the Sun) the short stories just felt too all over the place to really fall into. The nonfiction was notably better (The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones and Paper Tigers stand out) but there was too much focus here on the Occupy movement. Was Occupy an incredibly important cultural event from the year 2012? I guess so, but I think one of the pieces on it would have sufficed (I nominate Best American Minutes from the General Assembly of Occupy Wall Street).

It's just disappointing when there was so much GOOD in here. The Tenth of December, which tells the story of two narrators, one a boy and one a terminally ill man, was brilliant in getting both narrators' voices to perfectly harmonize. The Palace of the People transported me to post-communist Russia with its hopelessness married with modernity completely seamlessly. I don't understand how you can put such works alongside South Beach. I just don't. It makes me somewhat hesitant to try out the short stories edition of this series, but I know with Jennifer Haigh, Alice Munro, and Nathan Englander, I'm not going to be able to help myself.

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A mix of short stories, essays, magazine articles, and online resources, the 2012 edition also includes meeting minutes from various Occupy movements across the country. All of the material is chosen by a committee of high school students in San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am so very

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impressed by the depth and breadth of their selections, and the maturity of their reading choices in general. Amazing!!!! My only gripe, and it is a small one, is that there is no differentiation between the fiction and nonfiction, and one is left to determine for oneself what is made up or memoir...

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Good collection. Interesting stories on real life superheroes, immigrant stories, and funniest tweets.

A compilation of fiction and non-fiction pieces from 2011, selected by Dave Eggers and a team of high school students.

This is the second of these collections I've read; the previous one was the 2011 edition. As with that one, I think the miscellaneous section at the front is by far the weakest part

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of the book. It did give me a bit of an interesting jolt, though, as several of the pieces there were about the Occupy Wall Street movement, and, reading them, I realized with surprise and more than a little guilt that I had somehow forgotten all about those events in the last couple of years.

Anyway, once into the main section of the book, the quality skyrockets. I haven't done a direct comparison, so I may be wrong, but I think this volume has a much higher fiction-to-non-fiction ratio than the previous year. And some utterly fantastic fiction it is, too. There were maybe one or two pieces that, while well-written, were not really to my taste, but the overall quality was extremely high, and the best of it -- which is to say, at least half of it -- knocked the socks off me. What non-fiction there was was also very good. Even Jon Ronson's piece on real-life superheroes, which I'd already read elsewhere, was well worth revisiting.

If you're looking for the best of what's been published over the course of a given year, these anthologies seem just about perfect. I'll definitely make a point of going back and reading at least some of the ones I've missed.

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Ray Bradbury's introduction, "The Book and the Butterfly," is what makes this collection. It's a delight. The front section is weirdly varied and fun as usual, and Jon Ronson's "The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones" is suitably bonkers.

This is a fun, eclectic collection of writings -- from transcripts to comics to tweets to typical (in form, moreso than content)essays and short stories. The pieces were often timely -- referencing events in the news or national consciousness (Occupy Wall Street, for example), so a an interesting

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exercise in perspective. Under Eggers tutelage, these pieces are chosen by high school/a few college students with the only guideline being to read with a vengeance, to share indiscriminently and to vote truthfully. Elegiac introduction written by Ray Bradbury only months before his death on the importance of books. Transcendent and touching.

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