The Best American Science and Nature Writing edited by Amy Stewart

Summary from Goodreads:
Science writers get into the game with all kinds of noble, high-minded ambitions. We want to educate. To enlighten,” notes guest editor Amy Stewart in her introduction to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016. “But at the end of the day, we’re all writers . . . We’re here to play for the folks.” The writers in this anthology brought us the year’s highest notes in the genre. From a Pulitzer Prize–winning essay on the earthquake that could decimate the Pacific Northwest to the astonishing work of investigative journalism that transformed the nail salon industry, this is a collection of hard-hitting and beautifully composed writing on the wonders, dangers, and oddities of scientific innovation and our natural world.

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 includes Kathryn Schulz, Sarah Maslin Nir, Charles C. Mann, Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Kolbert, Gretel Ehrlich, and others

Amy Stewart, guest editor, is the award-winning author of seven books, including her acclaimed Kopp Sisters novels and the bestsellers The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Plants. She and her husband live in Eureka, California, where they own a bookstore called Eureka Books.

Tim Folger, series editor, is a contributing editor at Discover and writes about science for several magazines. He lives in Gallup, New Mexico.

I was really looking forward to this installment in the Science and Nature series - Amy Stewart!  Who writes books - both novels and science-y non-fiction! And owns a bookstore!

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016 is a wonderfully curated collection of science writing. Amy Stewart chose pieces not just for the science but for the narrative voice as well. There are wonderful articles reporting about ice in Greenland, the dubious evidence or lack thereof for bed-rest in pregnancy, why sports bras don't fit (oh man, such a great article), the health hazards women working as manicurists face in the workplace, the issues surrounding the push to bring electricity to all of India, the disservice done to women and girls with autism by the research/medical community, and a 15,000 page mathematical proof (you read that right). And yes, I cried when I read Oliver Sacks's piece.

I specifically have to commend Amy Stewart for purposely tipping the balance of the collection to reporting that affects women and women's issues (like sports bras).  *fist bump*

Dear FTC: I purchased my copy of this book.

Best American Infographics 2016 edited by Gareth Cook

Summary from Goodreads:
“When it comes to infographics…the best work in this field grabs those eyes, keeps them glued, and the grip is sensual—and often immediate. A good graphic says ‘See what I see!’ and either you do or you don’t. The best ones…pull you right in, and won’t let you go.”
—From the introduction by Robert Krulwich

The year’s most “awesome” (RedOrbit) infographics reveal aspects of our world in often startling ways—from a haunting graphic mapping the journey of 15,790 slave ships over 315 years, to a yearlong data drawing project on postcards that records and cements a trans-Atlantic friendship. The Best American Infographics 2016 covers the realms of social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and politics—including crisp visual data on the likely Democratic/Republican leanings of an array of professions (proving that your urologist is far more likely to be a Republican than your pediatrician). Here once again are the most innovative print and electronic infographics—“the full spectrum of the genre—from authoritative to playful” (Scientific American). ROBERT KRULWICH is the cohost of Radiolab and a science correspondent for NPR. He writes, draws, and cartoons at Curiously Krulwich, where he synthesizes scientific concepts into colorful, one-of-a-kind blog posts. He has won several Emmy awards for his work on television, and has been called “the most inventive network reporter in television” by TV Guide.


I really love this series.  However, in this volume I feel like a few of the infographics selected were overly-hard to read. Not because they were interactive or large (which was an easy problem to since I could find them online) but because the graphs were unnecessarily complex, hard to interpret, or had data the graphic didn't/couldn't explain (was missing a key, etc). On the excellent side, there is a beautiful 8-page foldout of a NatGeo infographic about dome architecture and a charming graphic of Popemobiles over the years. Of importance to bibliophiles, there's one that tracks literary road trips in the US. I'd encourage you to go to the webpage and use the interactive bits.

Dear FTC: I bought my copy of this book.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
A selection of the best writing, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and comics, published in American periodicals during during 2012 aimed at readers fifteen and up.

This is apparently the last Nonrequired Reading volume that Dave Eggers will edit.  It will be interesting in future seeing the new direction for this section of the Best American series.  As usual, Eggers and the 826 kids came up with a really good selection of web pieces, essays, and short stories. It felt much more heavily weighted toward longer essays/stories than the shorter goofy stuff, which is a bit of a shame because those are often brilliant small pieces.

Karen Russell has a great reporting piece about a torero who now fights with one eye, having been seriously injured by a bull (note: accolades are for writing, not subject).

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, a leading cancer physician and researcher, selects the year’s top science and nature writing from journalists who dive into their fields with curiosity and passion, delivering must-read articles from a wide array of fields.

I loved Siddhartha Mukherjee's book The Emperor of All Maladies and was thrilled to see that he was the 2013 guest editor for The Best American Science and Nature Writing.  A good collectionon the whole. I would have liked more "science-y" articles particularly since Mukherjee made a point in his Introduction of saying that he looked for articles that explained the technicality of science.  It felt very pop-sci to me. For example, I couldn't quite get a take on the essay about shipping Russian iron ore to China via the Arctic and the Bering Strait - sort of about global warming and globalization, but then not very science oriented either.

There is an excellent essay by Jerome Groopman on new advances in cancer treatment with immune therapy and David Quammen has a chapter from Spillover in here as an essay from PopSci.

The Best American Essays 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
Selected and introduced by Cheryl Strayed, the New York Times best-selling author of Wild and the writer of the celebrated column “Dear Sugar,” this collection is a treasure trove of fine writing and thought-provoking essays.

Cheryl Strayed is probably the best choice as this year's guest editor for the Best American Essays collection.  Between Wild and Dear Sugar she's in just the right place to sift through the many essays published in the previous year.  And this is a very readable collection.  Each piece seemed to be chosen to showcase some aspect of personal growth or challenge and I really appreciate how her preferences went into her editorial process.  Standout pieces include Alice Munro's "Night", Vanessa Veselka's "Highway of Lost Girls", and Zadie Smith's "Notes on Attunement".  There was also the ultra-weird "Keeper of the Flame" - Matthew Vollmer gets some props for the research on that one because I don't think I could have stomached being in the same room with all that Nazi paraphernalia. Ick.

The Best American Infographics 2013

Summary from Goodreads:
The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media—from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic—reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge—on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more—to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral.

The Best American Infographics captures the finest examples from the past year, including the ten best interactive infographics, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world.

It's Best American time and, guess what? There is a new addition to the series - The Best American Infographics!

Statistics and pictures, yay!  I've been learning more about data visualization (adding to the job skills, yo) and it was fun to see how the compilers used the intersection of information and art. My only issue, and it likely will be hard to correct when converting newspaper-sized or web-page-sized graphics to print, is that the binding cuts through the middle of the graphic and makes it hard to read. Only a serious problem with one or two graphics, though.  I'd love to see this as an enhanced ebook to get the interactive graphics working (might make the file size too big, though...).

The Best American Science Writing 2011

Rebecca Skloot, author of the acclaimed The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and her father edited the 2011 Ecco volume. This is a very well-curated collection of science essays spanning from perennial sources The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Discover to the less-common Vanity Fair and Mother Jones and the Speakeasy Science and Not Exactly Rocket Science blogs. Great breadth of sources.

Must-read articles include "What Broke My Father's Heart" (included in The American Essays 2011 edited by Edwidge Danticat), "BP's Dark Secrets", "The Estrogen Dilemma" (this one is really good, I took a course in clinical epidemiology from one of the original researchers on the WHI study that was terminated due to unexpectedly poor outcomes), "Cary in the Sky With Diamonds", and "The Enemy Within".

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011

Catching up with 2011's Best American Sicence and Nature Writing.  Edited by Mary Roach - whee!

A good collection, with many good pieces here that need to be read by a wider audience.  Such a good reflection of how Roach is a great writer popular science books with an eye for a great story.  A lot of "famous names" in this volume including Jonathan Franzen, Stephen Hawking, Malcolm Gladwell, Atul Gawande, and Deborah Blum (whose article "The Chemist's War" was later incorporated into her book The Poisoner's Handbook).  Roach arranged the articles in alphabetical order by author, so there's monkeying about with agreement or disagreement of organization.

• Bhattacharjee's "The Organ Dealer" about the illegal kidney trade
• Bilger's gag-inducing (at the very end) "Nature's Spoils"
• Dittrich's "The Brain That Changed Everything" which brings a very personal sense of history to the story of a man with brain damage resulting from a surgically-absent hippocampus
• Freedman's "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science" which highlights how reported medical research oftentimes is later proven incorrect or inconclusive
• Gawande's haunting "Letting Go" about the disconnect in the medical establishment regarding end-of-life care
• Mooallem's occasionally funny, occasionally stern "The Love That Dare Not Squawk It's Name" about the long-term mating habits of the Laysan albatross and the ridiculous levels humans go to to apply animal behavior as justification for human behavior
• Sack's "Face-Blind" about the neural basis and social complications of face-blindness or prosopagnosia
• Zimmerman's elegy "The Killer in the Pool"

The Best American Science Writing 2012

This year's offering by Ecco was edited by Michio Kaku - someone who I greatly like on any History Channel offering about the universe (when they actually have something either historical/scientific as opposed to pawn shops, shooting competitions, and various other "reality" television shows) and whose books I keep meaning to read.  So was already slightly more favorably disposed toward this volume compared to the Mariner 2012 volume.

Kaku decided on a rather interesting organization scheme - he ordered articles from most familiar subject to the general public to last familiar.  So he started with the most familiar subject, our own bodies, and an article from Science by Gretchen Vogel, "Mending the Youngest Hearts", in which the brave new frontier of medicine is lab-grown blood vessels created from infants' own stem cells for use in Fontan and other cardiac procedures.  He works outward through medicine, biology, ecology, psychology, and physics until he reaches the outer edge where science and religion butt-up against one another.  The latter half of the book is a bit heavy on the physics articles, so perhaps a few less of those and a smattering from ecological or engineering articles instead.

All the articles are highly informative - Rabelo and Bogdanich's NYT exposé regarding the over-radiation of patients by untrained/uncertified medical technicians, John Fischman's rather frightening article regarding the predictability of criminal behavior in relation to brain structure, Jaron Lanier and a look back at IBM's Watson, Rachel Aviv's "God Knows Where I Am" about the fine line of madness and sanity and the gaps in our mental health system.  I particularly enjoyed "An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer" by Denise Grady - a new direction in cancer research wherein a patient's immune system could be trained to kill cancer cells without the toxicity, side effects, and dangers of traditional chemotherapy and radiation; given that certain cancers have mutating genetic structures it would also be easier to modify therapy if a mutation changes the surface proteins, etc.  On the other hand, I felt "The Fire Next Time" - a Rolling Stone article by Jeff Goodell - really didn't have as much "science" in it as other articles, even for a lay-article, and was instead more of a call to arms.

Only two articles over-lapped the Mariner volume - "Beautiful Brains" by David Dobbs and Rivka Galchen's "Dream Machine" - so I got a nice set of articles read between the two volumes.

Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012

Well...this volume hits kind of a weird middle-space for me. Taken individually, the essays in this edition of Best Science and Nature Writing are good pieces of journalism. Six come from The New Yorker, three each from Scientific American, Wired, and National Geographic, two each from Outside, The Atlantic, and Discover, and singles from California Magazine, Popular Science, and Orion. But together...somehow they strike me as lacking in breadth, if that makes sense.

After an introduction focusing in scientific paternalism, Ariely divided the essays into subjects: Bacteria/Microorganisms, Animals, Humans (the Good), Humans (the Bad), Society and Environment, and Technology. However, two of the bacteria/micro essays are about nearly the same thing (normal human microbiota and how that plays into immune response/chronic disease) while the third concerns new food allergy research and treatment. It's hard to determine what's "good" or "bad" about the human sections - I can't tell where the dividing line is ("Sleeping with the Enemy" is in the good section, yet is about how modern humans displaced/bred out the Neanderthal - and extincting species is something we seem to be good at, while "The Feedback Loop" - about how we can modify human behavior to combat speeding and medication non-compliance - is in the bad section). John Seabook's New Yorker article "Crush Point" (which I read in the original publication) is a good piece of human interest/courtroom reporting but doesn't seem to contain a lot of "science" regarding crowd dynamics. It probably would have been better to list the articles alphabetically by author rather than try to group them.

Many of the articles, no matter the scientific ground grown in from paleontology to neurobiology to computer science, apply the information therein to society as a whole. Lab-grown beef, knock-out genes in Mosquitos that could fuel reactions to GMOs, a hazy article about why humans have a connection with an auquarium (the Roberts article about Wallace J. Nichols was an odd one), urban sprawl, molecular gastronomy, an eccentric physicist and the real-world probability of a theoretical quantum computer, if we must defend our humanity from the likelihood a computer could pass the Turing Test/how to be a more "human" human - everything circles back to human or human-like behavior. Given that Ariely is a psychologist that's not surprising but it makes the collection very flat and more like a pet than a presentation of good scientific work across all disciplines.

Current book-in-progress: The Best American Science Writing 2012 (yeah, that other one) - oh, and the Readathon is tomorrow
Current knitted item: Shrug - we are almost to the diamond pattern!
Current movie obsession: Watching The Voice episodes off the DVR
Current iTunes loop: Some free tracks I got from Starbucks - eh, is ok

Best American Non-required Reading 2012

Getting back into the Best American Project groove.  I don't always read the Non-required collection.  Sometimes the pieces just don't resonate with me.  The 2012 volume - it has an introduction by Ray Bradbury.  Likely the last piece he finished before his death (he passed away two weeks after it was turned in).  So I had to buy it and read it.

This collection didn't seem as light-hearted as previous NR's that I read. The "Front Section" bits are usually more light-hearted, in my opinion, with funny Internet lists and in this collection many of them are about the Occupy Movement (manifestos, minutes, essays) or have an undercurrent of exasperation underneath them (Alexie, Diaz, Ragsdale).

The short-story/essay section is amazing. Just amazing. Short fiction from Louise Erdrich, Julie Otsuka (wow, just wow), and Jess Walter. Essays from Olivia Hamilton/Robin Levi/Ayelet Waldman (makes me mad), Jon Ronson (who knew there were actual people dressed up as superheroes?), John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Wesley Yang.

I got a little sniffy over the transcription of a eulogy given at Steve Jobs's funeral by his sister, Mona. And I'm not a Jobs acolyte - she said such beautiful things.

Finally, there was one essay that just grabbed me.  It was such a courageous act of memoir and confession.  Jose Antonio Vargas wrote "Outlaw", a short memoir detailing his life as an undocumented child immigrant, sent here by his mother to join his grandparents for the chance at a good education, and his decision to tell his story.  I hope Vargas gains his citizenship. If you need evidence why the Dream Act should be passed then you need to read this essay.

Current book-in-progress: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012
Current knitted item: Shrug - further along on the second sleeve!
Current movie obsession: The Avengers (is Joss Wheedon's commentary kinda obnoxious?)
Current iTunes loop: Imagine Dragons - again, love them

Dewey's 24 hour Readathon 2011: I'm in!

Having missed last year's Readathon due to travel, I almost missed this year's 'thon due to inattentiveness.

Surprise, right, since I'm having trouble keeping my head on straight.  But!  I have signed up just in time (holy cats, there are over 400 readers!) and, by some miracle, I don't have a bookstore shift in the middle.  Yay!  I will have to run out for food tomorrow (advance planning = fail) but I did round up a stack of books to work through (advance planning = win):

Yikes!  Quite a stack, right?  You are thinking I am crazy, no?

Well, I tend to count my Readathons in total number of pages read, not just books, and I often take the opportunity to knock off half-finished things.  Also, there are MG/YA books in this stack due to my woefully neglected Newbery Project - they read mucho rapido.  Thirdly, I have the attention span of a gnat right now and I may have to jump around from book to book depending on interest.  I don't want to waste time staring at the 1000s of books in my house, trying to make up my mind.

Projected titles, top-to-bottom (not reading order, this is just so the stack wouldn't fall over):

• All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (in progress)
• Best American Short Stories 2011 edited by Geraldine Brooks (Best American Project)
• Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi (galley I picked up from work that Pam loves TONS)
• The Sea of Monsters and The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan (yeah, yeah, I got behind on my Percy Jackson reading)
• Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (because I want my store to adopt a penguin)
• Spindle's End by Robin McKinley
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Newbery, but I have the cool HarperPerennial cover)
• The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley (Newbery)
• Crispin by Avi (Newbery)
• The View From Saturday by E.L. Konigsberg (Newbery)
• I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Treviño (Newbery)
• Vintage-looking "Natural History of Birds" journal that I write all my Newbery Vocab in (I will not be reading this, obviously)
• Second Reading by Jonathan Yardley (in progress)
• Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd (in progress)
• Needles and Pearls by Gil McNeil
• McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes (because it has been hanging around the house too long)
• Still Alice by Lisa Genova
• Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes (for the book, in progress)
• Das Niebelungenlied translated by Burton Raffel (for the book, in progress)
• The White Devil by Justin Evans (galley I requested ages ago - sorry)
• Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson (galley I requested ages ago - sorry)

Something I will be trying very hard NOT to read: my dratted manuscript (mostly through draft version #6 - it will perhaps be ready for eyes other than mine by draft #10...perhaps not)

The Best American Essays 2011

This is a very well-curated selection of essays.  Danticat did a beautiful job winnowing the submissions to heart-felt essays (even the informational ones).  Two favorites were seeming opposites: "What Broke My Father's Heart" by Katy Butler and "Topic of Cancer" by Christopher Hitchens.  Riveting.

The Best American Short Stories 2009

This was my last "Best American" 2009 book yet to read and I'm glad I saved it for the end.  Each of the stories in this volume are wonderful selections, very wide ranging, and occasionally gut-wrenching.  Brava to Alice Sebold for her selections (in her introduction she notes that out of the 200 hundred stories she read in consideration for this volume, eleven were immediately "in" - I wonder which ones).

The story from this volume that most haunts me is "Modulation" by Richard Powers - a story about a rogue music "virus" and its easy spread and effect on listeners.  What affected me so deeply was the ability for something like this, and even more sinister, to spread in the exact way that Powers proposes in the story.  File sharing.  Powers also gives his characters, however briefly we meet them, a deep love of music in all its forms and that appeals to me as well.

Alex Rose's "Ostracon" is heartbreaking in the depiction of an elderly woman who doesn't realise the depths of her dementia - her husband, however, dreads what the loss of Katya's memory portends.  "The Briefcase" by Rebecca Makkai is heartbreaking, too, chronicling a man's brief escape from his life political imprisonment by usurping the life of the man, a professor, picked to replace him in the body count; the briefcase of the story is the key to the unnamed man's salvation and downfall.

One story, however, seems altogether too real to be fiction.  "Beyond the Pale" by Joseph Epstein is narrated by Arnold Berman who tells the story of his love for Yiddish and how that love led him to translate the work of Yiddish-language writer Zalman Belzner.  The story is matter-of-fact, chronicling the life of an ordinary man and father who crosses paths with a piece of history.  The little details Epstein includes - the suits worn by a beloved grandfather, Gerda Belzner's idiosyncrasies, the arrival of children - make the piece seem like a mini-biography, less like a story, and it is all the more enjoyable for that reason.

All the stories in this volume are a delight to read, even the stranger ones like "The Peripatetic Coffin" and "Hurricanes Anonymous" which seems to have neither beginning nor end.  Never having read any earlier short stories volumes from the Best American series, are they all like that?  I guess I'll have to wait and see!

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

Getting side-tracked while reading is a terrible thing.

Because it takes me forever to catch up on the books I have started.  Like The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 - filled with great essays, graphic novellas (is that a category?), and funny lists.  One of the best pieces in the volume is "Diary of a Fire Lookout" by Phillip Connors, a record of his work as a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest.  Connors documents both the serenity of his forest surroundings but also the tense work when a fire is spotted; the last few entries with the little fawn are heartbreaking. 

Another great inclusion, but one with a really creepy subject, is "The Chameleon", a New Yorker article by David Grann.  The subject is one Frederic Bourdin, a thirty-something man infamous for impersonating teenage boys not because he has some odd sexual fetish but because he just doesn't seem to want to be himself.  Bourdin even came to the US by impersonating a missing Texas teenager, an impersonation that earned him jail time and deportation when discovered.

Other great pieces:
"Wild Berry Blue" by Rivka Galchen (featured in a Teaser Tuesday post in November)
"The Temp" by Amelia Kahaney
"Triplet" by Susan Breen
"Everything I Know About My Family On My Mother's Side" by Nathan Englander
"David Foster Wallace" by Jonathan Franzen

For a hoot, check out the "Best American Craigslist Items and Offers to Barter" - insane, head-scratching, funny, and cringe-inducing all at the same time.

Next up in my "Best American" project: The Best American Short Stories 2009 edited by Alice Sebold

OMG, BOOKS!!!!!

I came home after working all day, and chilling with Jackie and Eric at BW3 after, to find a little surprise:

I don't think the doormat is doing a very good job of hiding the pile....

And what was in those boxes?

The two big boxes contained 32 Best American series trade paperbacks - it was my Alibris order (the smallest box was my Dad's Christmas present)!  I so rule at bargain shopping; 32 trade paperbacks @ $1.99 apiece + free shipping from Alibris - 15% off coupon = $53.  Booyah!!  I'm most excited about:

Edited by Margaret Atwood (squeee).  And:

The first Best American Essays volume from 1986.  This is the most marked-up volume I got (from the Catalina High School library in Tuscon, Arizona - there's a bookplate and library markings all over it) but I wasn't going to argue about it for an out-of-print volume that is surprisingly in good condition otherwise with only one crease in the spine.  The other volumes look fairly unread, which is kind of sad when I think about it (and, strangely, each book had a printed manifest tucked into the front cover, with a coupon off my next order from Alibris...I now have 32 coupons to use by February 2010, haha).

Also included in the packages today was a small, unmarked plain white air-mail bubble envelope with no return address.  Little did I know it contained a surprise from the UK:

Rebecca Skloot had sent out a tweet requesting readers/reviewers for Havi Carel's book Illness: The Cry of the Flesh a few weeks ago and I decided to tweet Rebecca back and get Dr. Carel's information.  Dr. Carel is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England in Bristol and Illness looks at the philosophy of illness as part of "The Art of Living Series" from Acumen Publishing; she also weaves her own story into the book as a sufferer of lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM).  This is the first review copy I personally requested - I wasn't offered it first - and I feel very (lucky? privileged?) to receive a copy from "across the pond"; I can't wait to get started.

I have sooo many new books to read!!!!!!  If my nook had come today I think I might have burst from book-love!  I certainly wouldn't be able to sleep - too much to look at.

******EDIT:  In my super-excitement (and overly tired state), I completely forgot to list the books because it's not like you can read all the spines.  So I received:
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 edited by Dave Eggers
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000 edited by David Quammen
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 edited by Stephen Pinker
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2005 edited by Jonathan Weiner
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007 edited by Richard Preston
The Best American Essays 1986 edited by Elizabeth Hardwick
The Best American Essays 1987 edited by Gay Talese
The Best American Essays 1989 edited by Geoffrey Wolff
The Best American Essays 1990 edited by Justin Kaplan
The Best American Essays 1991 edited by Joyce Carol Oates
The Best American Essays 1992 edited by Susan Sontag
The Best American Essays 1993 edited by Joseph Epstein
The Best American Essays 1994 edited by Tracy Kidder
The Best American Essays 1995 edited by Jamaica Kincaid
The Best American Essays 1996 edited by Geoffrey C. Ward
The Best American Essays 1997 edited by Ian Frazier
The Best American Essays 1998 edited by Cynthia Ozick
The Best American Essays 1999 edited by Edward Hoagland
The Best American Essays 2001 edited by Kathleen Norris
The Best American Essays 2002 edited by Stephen Jay Gould (confession: I actually used to own a copy of this, purchased solely because of the essay "Welcome to Cancerland" by Barbara Ehrenreich....but seem to have lost it some time ago)
The Best American Essays 2003 edited by Anne Fadiman
The Best American Essays 2004 edited by Louis Menand
The Best American Essays 2006 edited by Lauren Slater
The Best American Short Stories 1989 edited by Margaret Atwood
The Best American Short Stories 1997 edited by E. Annie Proulx
The Best American Short Stories 1999 edited by Amy Tan
The Best American Short Stories 2000 edited by E.L. Doctorow
The Best American Short Stories 2001 edited by Barbara Kingsolver
The Best American Short Stories 2002 edited by Sue Miller
The Best American Short Stories 2003 edited by Walter Mosley
The Best American Short Stories 2004 edited by Lorrie Moore
The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King

Looking at each volume individually, I am very surprised at how little wear is present on some of the older volumes.

The Best American Essays 2008

The 2008 edition of The Best American Essays, edited by Adam Gopnik, has a very different composition from the 2009 edition, edited by Mary Oliver.  The Oliver-selected essays were on the whole quite short, a few jotted thoughts encompassing a complete idea whereas the Gopnik-selected essays are much longer, extended meditations.  I had to read a different way (if that makes any sense).

Gopnik opens the volume by defining three types of essays - review essays, memoir essays, and odd-object essays - and notes that the essay must always hybridize with other forms and genres to stay alive.  Huh.  I do think that's true and the essays Gopnik chose for this volume run to many forms including "Solipsism" by Ander Monson that falls under something more akin to an art form with words (like a letter-press broadside) combined with Word Mark-ups (very interesting).

Jonathan Lethem contributed what was probably my favorite essay "The Ecstacy of Influence: A Plagiarism" about (primarily) how art is created by riffing off extant works and current copyright law/lawsuits about intellectual propterty rights endanger that.  To make his case, Lethem includes a "Key: I is Another" at the end of the main body of the essay:

This key to the preceding essay names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I "wrote" (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way).  First uses of a given author or speaker are highlighted in bold.  Nearly every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly - for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it. (p 125)

Lethem follows that up with a "Key to the Key."  It's a very enjoyable essay, meta and tongue-in-cheek at times, but right to the point as regards the limiting nature of "possessing" but not sharing a work of art.

Gopnik included a number of odd-object essays on beading ("On Necklaces" by Emily R.Grosholz), Leica cameras ("Candid Camera" by Anthony Lane), buzzards ("Buzzards" by Lee Zacharias - but also morphs into a memoir essay), and an old boarding house with its occupants ("This Old House" by David Sedaris that is both funny and sad at the same time).  As I noted with the Zacharias piece, most of the odd-object essays are crossed with memoir because each author has a connection with the object at hand; it's like Heiddegger's observation that the act of observation changes the subject (and the author in this case).  The most interesting odd-object essay came from Rich Cohen who contributed "Becoming Adolf" in which he meditated on moustache types and his experiment with wearing a toothbrush (aka Hitler) moustache.

Atul Gawande made an appearance (surprisingly, I would have thought this would be for the Science and Nature Writing volume) with an essay titled "The Way We Age Now" about the aging US population and diminishing quality of geriatric (aka Older Adult Health) medical care.  Gawande profiles Dr. Felix Silverstone, a leading researcher in geriatrics for fifty years who recently retired at the age of 82 and understands all to well what is happening to his body, health, and mind.  This was the most affecting essay in the collection, for me, because Dr. Silverstone reminded me of my 83 year old grandfather who is still fiercely independent, goes to work everyday at his lumberyard (even though my uncle "owns" and "operates" it now), drives his Caddy all over hill and dale, and is sharp as a tack.  When I get old, I want to be like my grandfather.  It is concerning that the population in the US is graying and aging rapidly but the ability of the healthcare system to continue to offer quality medical care specialized to the elderly is failing.  Very, very scary.

I'm off to my next volume in my Best American Series project.  I'm about to be aided by a massive used book buy from Alibris (free shipping from Alibris's warehouse + 15% off coupon = 32 trade paperback for less than $55; genius)

Clear Off Your Shelves Challenge Count: 15/19

The Best American Essays 2009

My decision to start my Best American project was made when I read the first essay in The Best American Essays 2009; Sue Allison's short meditation on words - Taking a Reading from Mid-American Review - knocked my socks off.  If this is what I'm missing every year I need to read more.  More, more, more.

This a slim volume - less than 200 pages - and every essay Mary Oliver picked was a gem.  Richard Rodriguez meditates on the desert religions of the Holy Land in The God of the Desert, Gregory Orr relates a harrowing personal episode in Return to Hayneville, and Michael Lewis tells of his family's sojourn in The Mansion: A Subprime Parable.  Kathyrn Miles brings Darwin's canine companion, Dolly, to life in Dog is Our Copilot and Jill McCorkle observes the uses of profanity in Cuss Time.

Most enjoyable was John Updike's essay The Writer in Winter, almost heart-breaking in the honesty of an aging writer's essay:

With ominous frequency, I can't think of the right word.  I know there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language.  But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness (pp 173-174).

I want more.

Clear Off Your Shelves Challenge Count: 13/17

New Project: Best American Series

Because I am completely nuts, and need a way to organize my reading, I am starting another project.  I, more or less, hope that this helps moderate my ADD reading habits but I'm thinking probably not.

Of late, I've become enamoured of the Best American series from Houghton Mifflin.  I would like to read all of them, particularly those in the science/nature, essay, non-required reading, and short-story genre (mystery and travel writing may sneak in there, too, but I'm not terribly interested in the sports writing category).  I'm not really calling this a challenge, because the series is perpetual at this point in time, but I would like to catch up on the last few years before the 2010 volumes come out.  I think I will hit up the used bookstores in town for some of the much older volumes (and to save a bit of money).

Hooray, for new projects!

The Best Science Writing 2009 - Times 2!

One of my more recent goals is to read more science writing (when I start eyeballing my old physics textbook I know it's been a while since I did any serious science reading).  Conveniently, the "best" collections were published recently and I picked up two of them: The Best American Science Writing 2009 edited by Natalie Angier and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 (from the "Best American Series") edited by Elizabeth Kolbert.  Definitely a good place to start.

There is an overlap of three essays between the two volumes, which isn't too bad considering the two series have different editors and publishers: Atul Gawande "The Itch," J. Madeline Nash "Back to the Future," and David Quammen "Contagious Cancer."  Another overlap occured in two articles on verbal language in animals where Alex, the chatty African Gray parrot owned by Irene Pepperberg, took center stage and in two articles on recycling human waste.  Oliver Sachs and Gary Wolf each had different articles in the two volumes (does that make sense?).

Of the two volumes, the Kolbert-helmed book has the better breadth of topics in my opinion ranging from biomedical questions to psychology to economics (an odd choice, but appropriate for a science volume) to paleontology to theoretical physics.  Even the physics articles were well-chosen because they were well-written and easy to understand.  Nicholas Carr's reflective piece "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" was a very thought-provoking essay, as well as Benjamin Phelan's thoughts on human evolution, and Michelle Nijuis's essay "Taking Wildness in Hand" about deliberate relocation of species to avoid extinction.

I also didn't understand the arrangement of articles in the Angier volume.  Kolbert went for a straightforward alphabetical-by-author arrangement but I couldn't tell if Angier had arranged the articles to flow from one discipline to the next or had put her favorite article first (the Gawande) because the arrangement just didn't make any sense.  It didn't lend to easy reading because I assumed there was a flow to the Angier....and there was none. With the Kolbert I knew there was no superimposed order beyond the alphabet so I felt I could pick and choose my way through the book until I read all the articles.

Angier included two articles in her volume that I didn't quite see as necessary to the best science writing of the year: Theresa Brown's article about learning to enjoy life through caring for a dying woman (didn't quite find the point) and Dennis Overbye's piece about theoretical cosmology which was actually pretty hard to read (meaning I thought it could be done better).  Angier did include a wonderful piece about cataloging the evidence of physical torture, Jina Moore's "Reading the Body" which was beautifully written and highlights the problem of "proof" for torture victims.

The best essay overall was Atul Gawande's "The Itch" - included in both volumes for good reason.  He has a great writing style and covers a particular conundrum in cognition - how the brain interprets itch signals - beginning with the case-study of a woman who had unrelenting scalp itch causing her to scratch through her skull into her brain.  Freaky, right?  Go read the article to find out how her condition is treated.

I think I should go back and get the other Science and Nature volumes of the Best American Series - I really enjoyed Kolbert's work (she's featured in earlier volumes as a contributor) and Mobute recommended the article "Ask the Bird People" from the 2004 collection.  They're all still available, too.

Clear Off Your Shelves Challenge Count: 9/12