I figure these should all get three stars if they're doing their thing right. I heard Seth Meyers describe a perfect episode of SNL as one with 3 things that make you belly-laugh, three things you hate viscerally, and some filler. Essay collections are largely the same, and this one may actually be better than many.

As for the keepers:

"Consider the Lobster" by DFWallace is the "with us for years to come" winner here.

"Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn" by Jonathan Lethem is a fantastic meditation on place and place-memory--in this case, a subway station.

"Joyas Voladoras" by Brian Doyle (excerpted from The Wet Engine) is an exploration of the heart-as-machine and how it works in hummingbirds and whales that manages to drop some science yet still bathe the whole thing in magic.

"The Prince of Possibility" by Robert Stone is a remembrance of Ken Kesey and a sojourn to Mexico that's well worth the time.

Ted Kooser's "Small Rooms in Time" stayed with me for days despite (seemingly) making a light impression as I read it, which is pretty damned Kooserian of him.

Most of the collection was readable and reasonably rewarding, the the stuff that didn't blow my skirt up at least had the courtesy to announce itself as dismissible within a page or two. First time I've read one of these all the way through, but it was enough fun that I'm on to the 2010 now.

Great essays!

I bought this because of the 6 authors whose work I love, thinking this would be a great way to provide an anthology for my class. The problem is while I still love these authors, these essays aren't my favorite work by these authors. And too many dog essays. I get it. Orlean is a dog person. Although one of my favorites was about about a woman's trauma adopting a problem dog that she had to put down. Since a friend of my mine's dog was recently attacked and killed by such a dog, I had less sympathy for the author's will to reform Buster, and felt more like her relatives thinking the owner is the one who needs therapy. Still, here I am still writing about that essay, so it must have inspired debate in my mind. It captured the soft-hearted person's dog dilemma. If you adopt from the shelter—you might get a problem dog. But if you adopt from a breeder, you might get a dog with inbred health problems, and why create more dogs when all these loveable dogs are being gassed.

Well, enough on that. But my parting thought is this collection did leave me wondering. Of ALL the essays published in 2005, were these really the BEST?

I read these essays one a day.

I don't like or finish every single essay, but I love being exposed to such a variety of writing from a variety of sources.

I saw this on a display rack at the library, Susan Orlean's name caught my eye because I really liked [b:The Orchid Thief|228345|The Orchid Thief A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)|Susan Orlean|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1255578155s/228345.jpg|911511], and there turned out to be several writers in the collection whose names I recognized. I particularly wanted to read the Oliver Sacks essay, and was interested to check out the selections from David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, David Sedaris, and a few others. I enjoyed reading the collection, but it didn't really introduce me to any new writers I got especially excited about, and I was disappointed to find that the Oliver Sacks essay was just another revisitation of the [b:Awakenings|14456|Awakenings|Oliver Sacks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166606317s/14456.jpg|2755549] story of the post-encephalitic patients, with a slightly different angle (people's experience of time). David Foster Wallace's (predictably overlong and annotated) essay from Gourmet magazine may have been the most interesting one in spite of its length - he set out to review a lobster festival in Maine and ended up reflecting on animals' experience of pain and the need for the sort of people who read Gourmet magazine to reflect on the pain that goes into the food they eat. He doesn't make any judgment calls, just presents his research about what lobsters and other animals experience as they're boiled alive or otherwise killed, which I thought was a pretty interesting angle given the magazine it was published in. Overall, I don't regret reading this collection of essays, but there wasn't much that was exceptional about it, and it's not really worth seeking out to read when there are so many better books of essays out there.

A solid collection.

Hard to judge an essay collection, but overall pretty strong pieces in here. Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle blew me away, a short piece that packed a lot of heart that most essays find difficult to do. I also really enjoyed Sea of Information by Andrea Barrett and Mastering the Art of French Cooking by E.J. Levy. Oliver Sacks was good and Sedaris good in his light, amusing way especially in this short of a piece.

David Foster Wallace had one of his great short stories in here which of course can't be understated. They were a couple other interesting ones, but those are the ones that really stood out. I would recommend you peruse this if you are interested in essays.