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Rating: 
Summary: Are we "forced" to read it?
Review: Another reviewer accuses Eggers of "forcing" his tastes on the reader. I must be one of the lucky few who Dave Eggers did not force to read this book at gunpoint. The title of this book is "Nonrequired Reading" - by definition, you are going to find pieces which are off the beaten path.Personally, I found this book an invaluable tool to judge the state of modern writing. This is the only "Best American" collection I own, and I think it is the most valuable. Whereas this one gets criticized for being "too hip" the others strike me as being too high-brow or revisionist. This collection shows what people ACTUALLY READ. The story behind the book is that Eggers has a team of literary-minded high school students cull the best of everything they've read from the entire year. The works contained in this collection run the gamut from fiction, to journalism, to humor, to essays - it even includes a comic strip. What makes this book so indispensable for any aspiring writer is not only that it gives an idea of the current voice of writing and the new young authors who are writing it, but it also lists the publications where one can find them. Among the new authors that this book has helped me to discover is the very young J.T. Leroy. The author of Blackhawk Down provides an incisive and disturbing biography Saddam Hussein. The always dependable David Sedaris provides a very funny account of his brother Rooster's wedding. I would have felt I got my money's worth from the book if I had just read the forward by Eggers (the part we were supposed to "skip"). Eggers is one of the best, freshest voices in writing today. Even better is the introduction by Zadie Smith where she provides guidelines of "how to read", complete with a lot of useful quotes from literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Unmitigated Failure
Review: They should retitle this volume: "Nonrequired Reading, Where Literature Comes To Die" Why anyone would want to waste their time with pretentious drivel like this is beyond me. This is the most needless collection of mish-mash I have ever seen put together.
Rating:
Summary: Must Miss
Review: This anthology is dull, dull, dull, full of mediocre writers who couldn't achieve recognition if it wasn't for the keen perceptive eyes of Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith, two "literary powerhouses"--yeah, I even have to laugh at that one. If you hate Smith and Eggers, you'll hate this anthology even more. This volume is titled Nonrequired Reading for a reason. It's somewhat amusing to skim through while you're on the toilet, but I can't say that it merits anything more than a cynical chuckle, before being tossed into the garbage bin with last month's Cosmo.
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