The Best of The Best?

 While my Science, Nursing, and Business major friends can't even begin to understand why I was excited to take an essay-writing class this semester, I'm a Writing major and Literature minor, so they'll soon realize that my course work over the next three years of school is going to look very different than theirs. If they were assigned the various essays within this collection of legendary works to read, analyze, and apply to their own writing, they would most definitely not enjoy it. But I can say that getting to read the essays in this book was a great experience. I can't even imagine what it must feel like to be able to say that you have one of your very own essays in a collection that recognizes what have been deemed the best of the best from that year. It must be a pretty awesome feeling!
All in all, I will be honest in saying that not every essay in this collection appealed to me. There are only a handful that I have a thoroughly solid memory of after not looking at them for a few months, and some of them did not stand out to me as "the best" at all. But I guess that is the beauty of this kind of book. It is diverse. It recognizes all sorts of writers from all sorts of walks of life and offers readers the opportunity to delve into a series of various topics, reflections, stories, and narrative research. Every essay left me with a new idea, a shattered bias, or a distinct emotion regardless of whether or not I "liked" it. I have learned that most often, the authors of essays are different than the authors of fictional novels: they don't want you to simply like their work -- they want you to feel, to understand, to question, to analyze, and struggle with their work. I have never read an essay collection before, and even though there are five pieces within this one that I did not get the chance to read during my class, I will definitely be investing my time during quarantine to give them a read. I suggest you order yourself a copy!


My top five favorite essays from this collection:

1. Eat, Memory by David Wong Louie

2. Notes on Lazarus by Rick Moody

3. The Other Steve Harvey by Steven Harvey

4. The Trick: Notes Toward a Theory of Plot by Marilyn Abildskov

5. The Moon, the World, the Dream by Clifford Thompson

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