The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

 
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002

edited by David Eggers

Mariner Press

2002 

 

 

I enjoyed working my way through the Best American Comic series. It was a nice way to see a selection of good works from the years it ran, and I learned the names of several artists to add to my list. There are a couple earlier comics anthologies I want to check out too, ones the BAC editors named as inspirations for the series. But now that I've read its entire run, I also want to start something new.
 
My first encounter with the Best American Nonrequired Reading series was the 2007 volume, which has a cover by Carson Ellis, an introduction by Sufjan Stevens, and which showed up in bookstores that year more than any other volume of BANR before or since. So the idea of reading maybe these someday has been at the back of my mind for awhile now. 
 
My understanding of this series was that it was meant to be an anthology for vaguely alternative culture, the kind of thing that might show up in The Believer or McSweeney's but probably wouldn't be included in the more traditional Best American Essays series. And that might be kind of right? But it's also explicitly intended to appeal to a broadly-defined young adult audience, conceptualized as readers 15 to 25. The forward by the series editor is almost shockingly optimistic about the state of writing for young audiences and about the prospects for people in that age group (people like me, at the time this was written). By now, I basically can't even remember what it felt like to imagine a near future that's not worse than the present, but in 2002, the hopeful spirit of the 1990s still persisted, even if cracks were showing in the facade after September 11th and the US invasion of Afghanistan.
 
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 is mostly nonfiction, with a few short stories in the mix. There actually is a McSweeney's piece in here, as well as a couple from The Onion, including the now classic "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People", and a David Sedaris piece like you'd hear on This American Life. There's even a comic, "Bomb Scare" by Adrian Tommie, whose name I recognize from BAC, about a teen boy who isn't interested in sex, and finds that's starting to isolate him from his friends who are increasingly obsessed.
 
The entries are arranged alphabetically by author's last name, so any thematic clusters are pure coincidence, but near the beginning there are several pieces of longform journalism about teens from other parts of the world that politically-savvy Americans would've been especially interested in at the time - the 'Lost Boys', orphaned refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan, a Taliban fighter persuaded to defect for the Northern Alliance by letters from a childhood friend, Tibetan teens trying to decide whether to make a life under Chinese occupation or in exile in India, the appeal of cheap methamphetamine and motorcycle racing in a poor neighborhood in Thailand. Later Seth Mnookin profiles "The Nice New Radicals" for Spin magazine, about young liberal activists who care about most of the above causes but prefer working within institutional channels. (With a start like this, there's not a piece about Kony 2012 in BANR when I get to the right year, I'll be a little disappointed.)
 
Eric Schlosser has an article from The Atlantic that's apiece with his book Fast Food Nation about the manufacture of natural and artificial flavors called "Why McDonald's Fries Taste So Good". Probably the longest piece in the book is Gary Smith's "Higher Education" from Sports Illustrated, a profile and obituary of a Black high school basketball coach and how he grew to be a part of the community in the tiny Amish and Mennonite town he moved to in Ohio. Rodney Rothman's "My Fake Job" is a funny account of him hanging out at an internet start-up that was so disorganized no one even noticed he didn't actually work there - but apparently by the time it was chosen for the book, The New Yorker had disavowed it because it was at least partially fictionalized.
 
I didn't think the short stories were quite as impactful, but I liked David Schickler's "Fourth Angry Mouse" about the anxious grandson of a popular comedian trying and failing to live up to his legacy, and Heidi Jon Schmidt's "Blood Poison" about a young woman struggling through a particularly hellish annual visit with her aging father. 

In the Half Room

 
 
In the Half Room

by Carson Ellis
Candlewick Press

2020

 

 

In the Half Room is a children's picture book by Carson Ellis about an odd but still cozy cottage, that seems well-suited for a bedtime story. In the author's note at the end, Ellis says the idea for the book came from one of her children (though the child is somewhat unsettled by the way Ellis implemented it).
 
The half room is a place for impossible objects, a room of half-things. There's the right half of a person, the front half of a cat, the back half of a pair of shoes, and so on. Everything is fine, just halved. The text is simple and has a sing-song rhyme. Like in Goodnight Moon, we're introduced to objects individually, and then they're placed in the context of the room.
 

 
Once the scene is set, the half room gets a couple visitors. First, the left half of the young woman (who maybe looks a bit like Ellis herself). The two half-women go outside to dance together, and eventually recombine into a whole person. Then, the back half of the cat arrives. The two half-cats tussle and spat; they don't merge, but do eventually settle down to nap together. I think this is the detail that disturbed Ellis's kid, but it feels like authentic cat behavior.
 
This is a short, gentle little book with narration to lull you to sleep and imagery that feels like it comes from a dream. 

The Sword of the Lictor

 
 
The Sword of the Lictor
by Gene Wolfe

Orb

1982, reprinted 1994
 

 
The Sword of the Lictor is the third book in Gene Wolfe's quartet, The Book of the New Sun. It's the most episodic of the books so far, basically a picaresque, as Severian leaves the city of Thrax and journeys north through the mountains until he arrives at a very high lake nestled among them, meeting potential allies and enemies all along the way. Based on Wolfe's description, I think these are the Andes mountains and Lake Titicaca of the far future. Over the course of the journey, Severian both literally and metaphorically leaves behind his career as a torturer and executioner, and starts to become something like a hero (though still without becoming someone I would call a good person). In the first book, Severian told us that this entire tale is being narrated in retrospect from a time when he has become the Autarch, and at this point it's still basically unimaginable how that might happen.
 
If there is a theme to Severian's journey in this book, beyond his transformation from villain to savior, it seems to be a kind of uncanny doubling. He interacts with nearly every major character he's met so far, or else with someone like them. He also becomes increasingly convinced of the power of the gemstone he found in the first book, the Claw of the Conciliator, and loyal to that power. The description of the Conciliator makes him sound like a Christ-like figure, which I suppose makes Severian something like a convert to Christianity, someone like St Paul who received divine revelation on a long journey.
 
At the start of the book, Dorcas says explicitly what was already clear to me from the original scene, that the Claw brought her back from the dead after her body had been preserved in a lake for a generation or two. She can no longer bear to stay with Sevarian now that he is the chief executioner in Thrax, and leaves to return to Nessus. Severian can't really bear to stay in this job either. He gets invited to a party thrown by the Archon of Thrax where he's expected to strangle a noblewoman to death; instead, as he did with Thecla, he has sex with her and then helps her escape her sentence. He is once again disgraced by his act of mercy, and is once again forced to flee to the north.
 
In the mountains, he stays the night with a family of farmers. Here he encounters the alzaebo, alive this time. In the second book, Severian drank a potion made from the alzaebo's brain and ate some of Thecla's, and it was this that put a copy of her mind inside his. The living alzaebo uses its abilities to hunt, imitating the voices of those it's eaten to draw out their living relatives in a way that's genuinely creepy. Severian fights off the alzebo but the only survivor is their young son, also named Severian, who is the same age our Severian was when he was orphaned and given to the torturer's guild. At the same time that he meets the alzaebo, Severian meets Agia again, and she again tries to kill him (I have no doubt she'll show up to make onee last attempt in the final book). She explains something that definitely wasn't clear to me earlier, which is that a particular recurring character I'd barely attended to is loyal to her as has been responsible to siccing the various alien monsters that ambushed Severian in the previous book on him.
 
After failing to save the rest of the family, Severian takes the orphaned boy on his trip through the mountains. He reads to him from the book of allegorical stories about the future history of the world. The neo-medieval character of the far future world Wolfe has written seems to be supported by the lack of any forms of mass transit, mass communication, or mass education, and by the dictatorial power structure that prevails at every level. People are trapped wherever they're born, assigned to be a farmer or guild member or soldier or noble, stuck with the personalist rule of whoever's in charge of their village or city, unable to learn much about any other way of living.
 
The little boy dies in the mountains, killed by traps left by a previous autarch, a man powerful enough to command an entire mountain be carved in his likeness. If the boy was like Severian's doppelganger, then he fails to save himself. The old autarch awakes from cryosleep with plans to reconquer and resubjugate the world, and Severian kills him, prefiguring on a smaller scale how he will have to defeat the current Autarch to take over the role. 
 
Severian also fights and kills his former friend, Balderdans the giant, another small-scale prefiguration of what I think is his fate to kill the alien giant Aiba, who lives in the ocean and grows large as a continent and plans to break the whole world. We'd heard repeatedly that Balderdans and Doctor Talos lived in a house in the north. Well, Severian finds it, and calling it a 'house' really undersold its size, or the way Balderdans rules all the villages around the lake. Nearly everything we initially thought we knew about the giant and the doctor has proven false or misleading by this point. 
 
Severian's executioner's sword is broken in the fight, completing his separation from his old life, and his two symbolic victories - against a lesser Autarch and a lesser Aiba - now set him up to complete the real versions of each task. I find Wolfe's plotting strange, but what initially appears to be an almost random sequence of events across this book looks by the end to be a map in miniature, a fractal part that repeats the pattern of the whole, including both what's come before and what has yet to come.
 
The other thing we've kept hearing is in the north is a war, between the country ruled by the Autarch, and a people called the Ascians, who we know nothing about. Severian plans to continue north and join the war in the next book, so I suppose we'll see.

The Council of Frogs

 
 
The Council of Frogs

by Matt Emmons
Second at Best Press

2023
 
  
The Council of Frogs is a fantasy comic by Matt Emmons. It's set in the wastelands of a post-apocalyptic future, but events are unquestionably guided by magic, rather than science. A tiny little frog goes out into a hostile world to deliver a message to a warlock for the sake of his community.

Generations ago, a war-mage died in battle, and his corpse sank into a bog ... then returned to unlife as a lich. His magic also fused with a purse of frogs' eggs; they became his children, unable to speak but imbued with intelligence. Now he's reaching the end of his unlife, and sends one frog as a messenger to ask the warlock to take over his duties as the frogs' guardian.
 
Our little messenger sets out on a quest to find the warlock. Along the way he encounters dangers in the form of hungry birds and human knights and war-mages. He's aided by a beast-man, an oracle, and eventually by the warlock too. Each of those three initially seem dangerous, and Emmons gives the little frog an expressive face that shows his fear. In each case, it kind of seems like they might be trying to win his trust so they can trick him ... but then no, they all turn out to be as honest and helpful as they initially said. No one who's actually hostile bothers lying to the frog; they just immediately attempt to eat him or stomp him underfoot. 
 
Something about this plotting choice bothers me, although I can't quite say what. Maybe it's just the contrast with the knee-jerk stranger danger of the media I grew up with? Over the Garden Wall also has characters who look scary, but whose protestations of innocence prove true, but somehow the depiction of the world as fundamentally less dangerous than it seems rings more true in OTGW. In The Council of Frogs, the world is in tatters, and human supremacists aim to kill or subjugate anyone who's unlike them. In that context, it's important for those others to trust each other and form coalitions for safety, but I feel like Emmons make that look easier than it should be.
  
Emmons portrays the world as a wasteland where medieval technology mingles with the last remnants of the old society. The frog meets the beast-man (who will eventually become his closest ally) near an oil pipeline. The oracle (who tells the way to the warlock) has four arms, two of them obviously robotic. The warlock himself is either a robot or wears futuristic plate armor. The knights and war-mages are armored as well, but their outfits are more obviously medieval. In the end, the lich does find a successor and passes on his magic to a new guardian, though not the one he initially expects.

Stages of Rot

 
 
Stages of Rot
by Linnea Sterte
Peow

2017, reprinted 2023
 
 
Stages of Rot is a deeply enigmatic comic that depicts the decomposition of a dead whale, not at the bottom of one of Earth's oceans, but on an alien world where all manner of sea life fly through the air instead, the undersea biome coexisting with and layered on top of the surface. And because the whalefall is on the surface, humans are now one of the scavengers that feasts on the giant carcass. 
 
Artist Linnea Sterte divides the process into chapters based on which human group is present and what they're doing, but we're only one small part of the process. Sterte shows us the fish, the fungus, the macroscopic single-celled organisms that arrive to play their own roles. You get a sense that you're seeing a series of close-ups on a larger picture, a whole functioning ecology that remains mostly out of focus and even out of sight. 
 
Successfully communicating that feeling, of watching one step in the functioning of a larger machine, without ever zooming out to show the whole, is no simple task, I suspect. Done incorrectly, and I think it would seem too simple, or else like chaos, with no sense that it's guided by an invisible order. Keeping you, as the reader, with that tip-of-your-tongue feeling in your mouth the whole time, without ever telling you the word or making you feel like you simply don't know it, is kind of an incredible accomplishment. Scavengers' Reign was rightly hailed for doing something similar, and it had the benefit of animation, being able to show its processes in motion.
 
We watch as the flesh-eaters come to collect blood and meat, and to slay the 'pilot' who we're told is a human-looking homunculus who lives in the whales heart and guides its flight. Fungus begins to cover the whale and form the heart of a forest. 
 
The bone-cutters arrive to collect their materials. One carves a diatom, which we're told live in the upper atmosphere where humans rarely see them, so that perhaps the statue represents a memory in the bone as much as in the mind of the carver. 
 
The barbarians are next; called to the whalefall by a vision or dream. For them the journey into the whale represents something hard to define, perhaps the passage into adulthood, though I might be wrong. The forest expands ever outward. 
 
The last humans to arrive, the entomologists, collect specimens of every kind of life that visits or emerges from the fallen whale. They catalog it all and fill a museum. They even resurrect the pilot, who lives in the museum for awhile, before flying away, to the highest part of the sky, to join with another living whale. The cycle is complete and begins again.
 
Sterte uses a limited color palette to give each chapter its own feeling, distinct from the others. The flesh-eaters and barbarians both have more pink and red, the bone-cutters and entomologists more yellow and green. The alternation feels like a cycle, like the turning of seasons, and feeds back into the sense of hidden order propelling the book. This is not an especially long comic, and it has very little dialogue, but it's very effective at communicating the mystery of the way bodies are reclaimed by the world after death. 

Shadowlands

 
 
Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages

by Matthew Green

WW Norton & Company

2022 
 
 
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters. 
 
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
 
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
 
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
 
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
 
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.

Tower Dungeon 3

 
Tower Dungeon 3

by Tustomu Nihei
Kodansha

2025
 
  

The previous volume of Tower Dungeon ended on a cliffhanger, with a party of rival adventurers ambushing our heroes. In the brief, losing fight, Yuva (our audience viewpoint character) got knocked off a ledge, guaranteeing a 10 meter fall and a hard landing on the stone floor of the story below.

 

The whole mission had been a mess from the start. The Necromancer killed the king and kidnapped the princess, caused the legendary Dragon Tower to reappear, and took his hostage up to level 100, a kilometer above the base. The titular tower dungeon is big like a mountain, with a perfectly circular base, flawless construction, an impossible height and size. The royal guard sent to save her was massacred by the tower's perils, and the survivors were recalled by parliament, who wanted the royal-blooded guard to sit as a place-holder on the throne until the princess could be returned. 

 

Master archer Enriqo, fire magician Lilisen, and the recently conscripted Yuva were the only official rescuers left. A boom town sprung up outside the dungeon as ambitious adventurers sought to make their fortune by pillaging the tower. But the ambush wasn't just treasure hunters - they were a handful of former royal guards, now mercenaries, sent by an unknown rival member of the royal family to prevent the princess's rescue.

 

Now Tower Dungeon volume 3 opens with super-strong Yuva proving himself much hardier than anyone suspected. Until now, he's only used his strength to carry heavy supplies, and he's seemed to get hurt as easy as anyone. But he survived the fall, and we watch him scale the stone-block wall, endure several arrows, and overpower the mercenaries to save his friends. The trio seem bonded by the experience. Enriqo reveals something the mercenaries wanted - a magic arrowhead given to him by the departing guard captain, which should be able to slay the undead dragon on level 80. Lilisen was initially pretty dismissive of Yuva, but her feelings are warming rapidly.

 

Fearing there might be more mercenaries waiting back in town, they decide to push on despite their injuries. They find the all-girl adventurer gang the Excavators have been turned to stone by a basilisk, depicted here as a giant moth with eye spots on its wings. Yuva is turned to stone too, but Lilisen and Enriqo manage to slay the monster, returning everyone to normal. A goth gal from the gang kind of flings herself at Yuva which makes Lilisen visibly jealous. I think she likes him likes him. Later, she gives him a magic ring so they can hear each other's thoughts. The poor guy is so naive and innocent, but his thoughts reveal he likes her too.

  

The final chapter of this volume opens up the narrative a bit more. In his sleep, Yuva dreams of the kidnapped princess. It seems she's made a kind of psychic contact with him. Members of the royal family all have dragon blood, they live supernaturally long lives and some can transform into dragons. Lilisen's magic might be a draconic power too. The princess warns Yuva that the necromancer is trying to merge his consciousness with the zombie dragon, and that Bad Things will happen if he succeeds. When Yuva awakes and tells the others, Enriqo realizes something Yuva (raised by his grandparents in a tiny rural village) never guessed about himself - he's part of the royal family, and his super strength comes from his dragon blood.
 
Nihei continues to show us unusual takes on classic fantasy creatures. The basilisk moth is both imposing and different from any interpretation I've seen before. Up to now, interactions between Yuva and Enriqo have been a bit stiff and formal; between Yuva and Lilisen almost cartoony in their sibling-like antagonism. As the three become closer as a result of their shared experiences, their interactions also become friendlier and more genuine, with the barriers imposed by rank or rivalry coming down to allow more honest exchanges.