I recently finished the first section of The Best American Nonrequired Reading and I wasn’t very impressed with it. Some of the lists were funny I will admit (especially the list of worst racehorse names) but I would have preferred to read a story or two instead. With lists, I didn’t feel like there was enough length to enjoy. I love getting wrapped up in stories and connecting with characters. When it came to reading lists I felt like it was disconnected and I did not feel that it had a good flow. I will admit that the reading did go by quite fast. And I can see how it would be easier to get a high school student to read something they can just pick up whenever they have five spare minutes, but at the same time, I think that when I was a high school student I would have enjoyed a short story a little more. Maybe if there weren’t eleven lists but instead just a couple short ones, I would have enjoyed it more. Or perhaps some of the humor incorporated in the lists was just wasted on me (I found it funny but not funny enough to make up for reading so many lists in a row.) Whatever the reason, I would have to say that out of everything we have read in this class, I enjoyed this section the least.
I must admit though, this section does bring more meaning to the grocery store anecdote.
On the bright side:
Things Worse than Reading 29 Pages Worth of Lists
Having your teeth drilled by the dentist before you’re fully numb,
Falling off a cliff with sharp, pointy rocks awaiting you below,
Discovering that nightmare involving underwear, school, and 1,000 peers was not a dream,
The computer crashing two seconds after you typed the last word of your 20 page essay,
Drinking a little too much and retching on your crush’s new Nikes,
Remembering said alcoholic accident the next morning (or should I say afternoon),
The day after a night shift at the CUB (complete with 9 am classes),
Receiving a pop quiz after said night shift at the CUB,
Watching cougar football (yet another touchdown for the opposing team),
And last but not least,
Reading THIRTY pages worth of lists
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3 comments:
I loved this post--and I especially liked your own lists of things that are worse than reading the BN-RR. It almost seemed ironic to make a list in protest of lists!!
Well put.
I completely agree! I thoroughly enjoyed your use of a list to show your angst against the selected work. At times the lists were funny, but you are completely correct; it was often almost as dreadful as watching our football team fail, yet again, to score a single touchdown. I honestly think that these 30 pages of, well let's face it, nonsense, did provide for a nice break in the course. However, with that in mind, I think I would have preferred to have read SIXTY pages in a novel in the amount of time we had to read this. Frankly, I forgot basically everything I read the moment my eyes moved to the next page. Thank you for expressing your frustration in a humorous way!
Ok, this entry made me laugh. I completely agree that having more than a page or two of lists is just plain ridiculous for teenagers, especially considering that if I were in high school, I would feel like that was a big waste of time. Like you, I would much rather have been required to read a few short stories than to try and read thirty pages of lists. There was one list that I really did enjoy though, and that was the Best American First Sentences of Novels Published in 2006. After reading that part, I found myself going through the rest of the lists and trying to fit each line together to make actual stories out of them. This made the reading much more interesting and bearable.
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