Best American Non-Required Reading of 2010

While reading the editor's note in the collections Best American Non-Required Reading 2010, I learned that the pieces in this book are not chose by stuffy publishing companies but by people much like myself. Once a week high schoolers from the San Fran Bay area to lower Michigan get together and read individually the pieces that are sent to them. They then talk and decide which ones give them that "gut" feeling about which ones deserve their space that other companies may have not given them. I enjoyed reading this because i feel as though it helped me connect to the pieces in this book at another level aside from just being another assigned reading from my professor. Knowing that students my age thought enough about these articles and that composition was important enough to them to take their time and do this made me look at this book in another light. The introduction was well written and had a nice point behind it but i feel like David Sedaris took too many roads to actually get to his real point. After all the intros and what not one of the 1st pieces i read was Best Women Comedy Piece. This was a great piece to start off with because it got you laughing and gave u a sense of what this reading was going to be like. I enjoyed how Wendy Molyneux actually wrote this article telling the reader everything she was doing while she wasn't writing. Her sarcastic and witty jokes were easy to follow however clever enough to get. Next i read about the overqualified Joey Comeau. This man actually sent real letter to companies telling him why he was great for the job, or maybe too good for it. Imagining a company like Nintendo or Hallmark actually taking time out of their day and reading these fake resumes was too good. The idea was great and the writer was hysterical. Next was a piece by Berry Lopez which was under the category Best American 350-Word Story. The 350 word story came from a cause trying to rise awareness of the climbing CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Basically this story was a man walking along a path and finding a piece of the inner earth that could only be there from a splurging volcano. However with no volcano's in site and with this rare piece of mineral in hand he leaves it behind instead of taking it with him to show his daughter he was trekking to see. The moral of the story is that the earth we live in now isn't ours to take, but  better place to leave behind for our sons and daughters. However with climbing CO2 levels and excess amounts of fossil fuel emissions being let into the atmosphere we are making that task virtually impossible. I thought this reading was a great alternative to the regular facts and boring lectures about what we need to do. Last but not least i finished reading  piece titled, Best American Poems Written in the Last Decade by Soldiers and Citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan. Right off the bat i knew that no matter if i agreed or disagrees about the war in Iraq this collection was important above all other. These poems are from men on the front lines risking their lives. No matter the cause those men deserve the up most respect. I was surprised to see that the poems were published in the context they were. Usually the press will only release things that are uplifting and showing hope to then end of this conflict, however this was different. All of the poems were dismal and sad. The men writing them i felt what they were trying to say, and it was a very sad read, but every important at the same time. Overall i enjoyed all of these reading very much. No matter the message they weren't the typical messages said in the same typical ways. Maybe the reason why i liked them so much was because the title of the book was "NON-REQUIRED READING". If the title was changed to "Required Reading", the feeling may be different.