How to sum up this wise, wonderful book? Cheryl Strayed, writing under the pseudonym Dear Sugar, wrote a weekly advice column from 2010 through 2012. The questions covered the gamut of the human experience: grief, love, infidelity, abuse, parenting, estranged families, friendship, wedding planning, divorce, you name it. Sugar’s response often included heartfelt sorrow or sometimes an upbraiding, but almost always a story from her life that fit the situation perfectly. These weren’t two or three-paragraph responses. These were beautifully crafted, thoughtful, deeply moving essays. This book collects the best of those essays.
I listened to this while driving and taking walks around the neighborhood. Since this book is narrated by Strayed, the feeling of a personal connection was amplified, especially when her voice cracked with emotion as she related her own stories. There were times I would stop on a walk and marvel at this raw emotion wrapped in unconventional yet utterly appropriate advice.
This is the inaugural volume of the Best American Essays series, which has celebrated the best annual essay writing for forty consecutive years. This one showcases the essayistic talent of some literary icons in their heyday: Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Jay Gould, Julian Barnes, and Cynthia Ozick, among others.
Many of the collected pieces here failed to stand the test of time, but there were exceptions. I loved On Boxing, which I read as part of a larger collection by Joyce Carol Oates (see my review). And The First Day of School by Cynthia Ozick was a wonderful, evocative essay about the excitement and nerves of the first days of college at NYU’s Washington Square campus in the 1940s.
The standout for me was Kai Erikson’s Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters, where he muses about the deliberations leading up to the decision to drop atomic bombs on the civilian cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. Why not a test on some uninhabited part of Japan to demonstrate the awesome power?
There is no law of nature that compels a winning side to press its superiority, but it is hard to slow down, hard to relinquish an advantage, hard to rein the fury. The impulse to charge ahead, to strike at the throat, is so strong a habit of war that it almost ranks as a reflex, and if that thought does not frighten us when we consider our present nuclear predicament, nothing will. Many a casual slaughter can emerge from such moods.
Kai Erikson, Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters
The notion that humans have a natural, unstoppable killer instinct is a depressing but plausible conclusion.
I love essays. I have a shelf full of these Best American essay collections dating all the way back to its inaugural volume from 1986. I’ve dipped in and out of these over the years, picking and choosing what looked interesting to me.
I’m taking a different approach with the latest volumes (I read the 2024 collection last year). I’m reading all the essays straight through, cover to cover. This means I’m reading essays I probably would have skipped after the first two or three paragraphs, thinking the topic or voice wasn’t for me.
This new diligence has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because, out of 21 essays in this volume, four did absolutely nothing for me. I should have skipped these and been better off for it. But rewarding because there were a few essays I wouldn’t have read that surprised me. I either learned something fascinating or developed an appreciation for a different style of essay writing.
I bought this little gem from the Midtown McNally Jackson bookstore on our last week of a five-month stay in New York. Collected here are witty commentaries, short stories, poems, and essays, all originally published in The New Yorker, and each an ode to what I’m sure White would agree is the greatest city on earth.
The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello.
I had to stop myself from gulping this down in one sitting. I read it slowly over a few evenings, savoring, reminiscing, and laughing aloud in places. I loved “The Rock Dove,” a piece on the roosting habits of New York City pigeons, and “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” an essay on the challenges of leaving a city he loved. But honestly, every piece in this collection is great.
Ah, Ralph Waldo Emerson: what a treasure. I’ve read most of these essays before, but never so deeply, and never with such illumination. His wisdom is simple to understand, yet difficult to practice in a world of popular opinion and distracted thinking. Trust your own thoughts. Be yourself. Don’t try to impress or copy others. Cherish your friends. Most of all: be present. Life is here, now; life is not studying the people or times of long ago or so-called leaders preaching hate and divisiveness.
Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Self-Reliance is his most famous essay, and it reads as fresh today as in Emerson’s time. I enjoyed lesser-known Circles, which contends that all our knowledge and enthusiasms are temporary, soon to be replaced by even greater knowledge and better enthusiasms. To find truth, embrace change and nature. And Compensation, which celebrates the neutrality and balance of nature, even in grief:
The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.
Emerson wrote Compensation before the death of his five-year-old son Waldo. His take on grief would turn bitter in his follow-on essay, Experience.
Alongside these essays, I’m slowly reading through a collection of Emerson’s journals. It’s amazing to watch him shape his thinking as these roughshod ideas appear and evolve over time in his private musings.
Favorite Highlights
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with the shadow on the wall.
The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.
Prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness.
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.
I’m on an essay kick, and this annual “Best American” series always provides a wide range of thought-provoking takes. Unlike past years, where I tended to pick and choose what I read, for this latest volume, I read each essay in order, skipping none.
Out of 22 essays, there were only a few that I scratched my head over, wondering what it was that the editor saw in the piece. Most I enjoyed, and a few were very, very memorable. My favorites:
An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.
Highlights
If things could be undone, if time could be wound back, like a film, if the past could be kept alive to compensate for the deficiencies of the present: these are the wishes that form character, that grow out of events that form character. It does not take much. The tree bends once, twice, then does not bend again. It grows now as it always will. — Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
There are many things that capitalism produces, and noble behavior on either end of the rich/poor spectrum is not one of them. But we admonish only the poor. — Brian Broome
This one didn’t meet my high expectations. The essays feel too forced and contrived, like the author is trying too hard. Lots of handwringing. Her circle of concern is very very large. I don’t know how many essays reference the sad departure of her children from her once full home. I have no patience for mourning the loss of a child who has simply moved across town. If only. I read a half dozen of her short essays in the hot sun, wanting to be done with the book and move on to something more comforting. The essays went down easier out of doors, even if I don’t subscribe quite so much to her views.
You can’t come back to something that is gone. — Richard Powers, The Overstory
Sometimes the only cure for homesickness is to enlarge the definition of home.
★★★★☆ | Essays, Writing, Memoir | Audio + Digital | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
I enjoy Ann Patchett’s novels, but I love her essays. She writes with such clarity and compassion. My first book of her essays was These Precious Days, which was written upfront as a collection of essays. This one came together after the fact as a compilation of essays Ann had written in magazines over many years. Only later did she decide to publish them as a book. As a result, there isn’t much of an underlying theme, other than Ann herself. I came for the essays on writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, and defying all odds, the opening an independent bookstore in the post Amazon era. Ann narrated the audiobook, which added to the personal voice of these essays. After reading this and These Precious Days, I will basically read anything she writes.
I loved Lamott’s Bird by Bird memoir on the writing craft. The writing here was good, but forced. Too many similes, too many quotes from others. Great life advice: be kind to yourself & others, all we need is love, etc., but it felt repetitive to me. Her advice on sobriety and community is heartfelt and immensely quotable.
Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiosity, Heartbreak, and Forgiveness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:
Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.
A cranky, comical book of essays written in the last years of Vonnegut’s life. He is depressed about the state of the world and our short-term minded treatment of it. He reminds you that everyone, even those experts in power only just got here, like everyone else and no one really knows anything.
A wonderful collection of essays across a variety of topics. I read her essay “Three Fathers” in the New Yorker a while back, but it’s so much more engaging to hear Ann read it aloud in her own voice. Her writing reminds me of my own if I were better — and that it’s possible to write and essay and still be impactful.
