The Best American Essays 2017

The Best American Essays 2017 edited by Leslie Jamison & Robert Atwan     336 pages

From Goodreads:

“The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA,” writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction. From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, from the beginnings of the universe to the aftermath of a suicide attempt, the genetic makeup of the eclectic and electric selections in The Best American Essays 2017 “thrill toward complexity.”

This was my first time reading a collection of essays by different people. I've read essays before, but ones that were written by one person, perhaps all centered on a particular topic. So this was new to me. Here are my thoughts on the subject:

I'm not really sure what the definition of an essay is, because based on the wide variety that is in this book, it seems like essays can be anything - thoughts on a subject of interest, personal stories, thoughts on a specific person (famous or not). When I had to write essays in school, they were a far cry from this, so I didn't really know what to expect with each new essay.

What I can say is, when I read reviews of other essays collections, Roxane Gay's, for example, I saw a lot of people complain about a lack of argument or break down of a topic into an argument. Now having read this collection (of the supposedly BEST essays in 2017) I can say that most essays do not make it clear what the argument is. In fact, most just seem to be a discussion, with the author's personal thoughts about the subject. So I think most people have the same problem as me and don't really know what an essay is (outside of a school context).

That being said, I enjoyed a lot of the essays in this book. Jamison did an excellent job of choosing a wide range of subjects and authors, whose topics were all over the map, including racism, abuse, addiction, and grief. Some of my favorites were "White Horse," "The Cost of Living," "If I Only Had a Leg," and "The Reader Is the Protagonist." These stories really drew me in and showed fascinating glimpses into the lives of people competently different from me.

I would recommend this or other collections in this series to those who enjoy slice of life narratives. They may be essays, but they are also stories, and you get very close to the author, they're showing you their brain working through something very intimately. 

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls

Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women by Elena Favilli and
Francesca Cavallo     212 pages

A children's book that reinvents fairy tales, inspiring girls with the stories of 100 great women from Elizabeth I to Serena Williams.

This is a great introductory book to the lives of women. The book covers historically famous female figures as well as contemporary figures, giving a brief story-like overview of their life and accomplishments. While the stories are only a page long, they are a great starting place to get any child excited about a particular figure and in this way inspire them to seek more in-depth biographies.  I love the illustrations for this book. Each woman has a different artist's portrait of them and all are beautiful, colorful, and capture their subject very well. The book is laid out well and covers a very diverse range of women from all over the globe and a wide variety of ages.

I would highly recommend this book to young children, but even as an adult, I highly enjoyed reading this book myself and learning about the lives of women I myself had never heard of until this book. It was a wonderful read.

Rags & Bones

Rags & Bones edited by Melissa Marr & Tim Pratt     356 pages

From Sir Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene to E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," literature is filled with sexy, deadly, and downright twisted tales. In this collection, award-winning and bestselling authors reimagine their favorite classic stories, the ones that have inspired, awed, and enraged them, the ones that have become ingrained in modern culture, and the ones that have been too long overlooked. They take these stories and boil them down to their bones, and reassemble them for a new generation of readers.

Meh. That's the overall feeling I have for this particular collection of stories. There are some stories in this book that I really liked, but overall, this was just an okay compilation.

The premise was for authors to take a "timeless" story and retell it, either in a completely new way, or at least slightly changed. Some of these stories I would consider "timeless" but there were some odd choices in this bunch - some stories that I had never heard of, so I wouldn't consider them "timeless." For instance - Gene Wolfe chose a story that, in his own words, is "one of those wonderful stories we have utterly forgotten." I would like to call this book out on it's "New Twists on Timeless Tales" claim. If I hadn't read a story before, I tried to track it down and read it first, so I'd understand how the author re-imagined the story. 

For the most part, these stories were very old, a lot of them in the Public Domain, so it wasn't hard. For Gene Wolfe's story, the "White Werewolf of the Saraban" I couldn't even Google it and get it's origin. It is so obscure a story it's only been published in one book - a compilation by Boris Karloff of all people - and it's worth a pretty penny if you want to own it. So, I didn't much appreciate being led to believe these stories were recognizable in any way.

What I'd like to sum up is that this book has a few choice authors that I really like and made me interested in reading this story - Neil Gaiman, Garth Nix,
Rick Yancey - but the majority of the stories, other than theirs, were just so-so. I wouldn't pick this book up again, and I wouldn't suggest it to someone unless I really knew they liked short stories or a majority of these authors.

Feral Youth

Feral Youth by Shaun David Hutchinson, Brandy Colbert, Suzanne Young, Tim Floreen, Justina Ireland, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Stephanie Kuehn, E. C. Myers, Marieke Nijkamp, and Robin Talley    310 pages

At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, ten teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life, and they were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around. They’ve just spent nearly two weeks learning to survive in the wilderness, and now their instructors have dropped them off eighteen miles from camp with no food, no water, and only their packs, and they’ll have to struggle to overcome their vast differences if they hope to survive.

Did it live up to the blurbs on the book - specifically the ones that caught my attention and made me want to give it a shot - i.e. "inspired by the Canterbury Tales," and the cover, let's be honest, is so beautiful and really fits my aesthetic - not really. I can see no connection that would warrant saying it's inspired by the Canterbury Tales other than that there are a whole bunch of people who are going somewhere and tell stories along the way - but kinda not really. 

The premise is a bit forced - the "narrator" suggests a storytelling contest for $100 dollars and, surprisingly, these disparate teens who seem to hate everything and each other, decide to go along with it. Their journey is a forced journey - they're in a "boot camp" of sorts for teens who broke the law in one way or another, and they've been prepped to survive in the woods and are then dumped in the middle of the woods, WITH NO COMPASSES, a flare gun that doesn't work, a knife, and sleeping bags. What kind of program thinks this is a good idea to let teens loose in the middle of the woods and expects them to get back at all, let alone unharmed? They weren't even given food!

I call B.S. on that whole business. The stories are loosely meant to explain why each teen is at the "camp" but mostly each story - and I mean all of them - is met with extreme doubt and bluff-calling. No one believes anyone's story is the "truth" and the beginning of the book contains a premise by the narrator about "what is the truth, anyway? You don't know my truth, you only know what you want to believe," and, "we're teens - no one believes us or wants to or understands us!!!" Okay, I get it. Teens are misrepresented all the time, misunderstood, yada yada. I was a teen. I work with teens. They're not all that mysterious. 

Now, the stories - some I liked, some I hated, some were straight up strange. The only story I really liked ended in a brutal murder, so I hope that teen's story wasn't actually true. Either way. This book was bizarre, at best, and does it's best to capture the unique teen experience, presenting a diverse cast of teens and their stories, attempting to address current issues, like woman's rights, minority rights, rape, etc. Some of the authors were successful in that regard, some not so much.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower     256 pages

Viking marauders descend on a much-plundered island, hoping some mayhem will shake off the winter blahs. A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the print of a bare foot on the inside of his windshield doesn’t match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl.

Just a whole bunch of stories about sad, sometimes pathetic people, whose lives are a train wreck. There were bits and pieces that I enjoyed - some clever prose popped in and out - but I really didn't much care for the stories. 

This had been on my to-read for a while, so I can only imagine I put it on my shelf when I saw there was a story about vikings in it. Sadly, the viking story was my least favorite out of the whole compilation. 

I really don't like reading sad stuff, so that's probably why I didn't enjoy Tower's stories. There was also a lot of meat butchering and general icky things that I just don't enjoy reading about. Most of the stories were told from a male perspective, which is fine, except that it came to be another blah story about a sad, depressed middle aged white man after another and yes, I'm going to say it: if you've read one, you've read them all. Boring, done.