This collection went beyond those that I usually look forward to reading, namely the Best American Short Stories and Mystery Stories and exposed me to six other volumes. The selections were well written and I enjoyed each one. I always look to expand my reading horizon and this was a great way to accomplish that goal. This volume to me was a great appetizer and I have all the volumes on my TBR list as I love a memorable entree too!

The Best American Series is an excellent anthology collection, if it's not already on your radar. An editor curates selections from the year's best previously published works across websites, journals, and magazines. Plenty are fiction, like Mytery and Science Fiction/Fantasy, and Short Stories, but I find their nonfiction selections to usually be pretty wonderful.

And I love essay anthologies, I think they're great for curing reader's block, when you're not motivated to find something new to read, or are facing a dearth of exciting reading material, or you've read or abandoned too many not good enough titles. Not to mention airplane or other stop-and-go, pick back up where you left off type of reading.

This is a sampler of two of the best pieces each from this year's volumes. I read half of it, the nonfiction selections. These were from The Best American volumes of Essays, Nonrequired Reading, Travel Writing, Science and Nature Writing, and Sports Writing (I even surprised myself with that one.)

A rundown of the nonfiction offerings in this one:

In "Cost of Living", Emily Maloney writes about the personal debt she accrued after a suicide attempt, which led to her working in medical billing and saddled for years with the ocean of debt. She draws back a curtain on what goes on in hospital billing, and it's alarming and wrong. But the hospital where she worked was itself in debt, and the endless cycle ping pongs responsibility for bills back and forth between providers and patients.

In "Snakebit", Alia Volz explores, in richly descriptive prose, one of humanity's most common phobias - that of snakes - and what she remembers from her childhood of the beginnings of this fear, and how it has dogged her into adulthood. Her writing is lush and lovely, even on such an inherently scary topic. Here she describes being served a rattlesnake pot sticker at a fancy hotel restaurant:

Being terrified of an appetizer is embarrassing.
The standard treatment for phobias is exposure therapy. Eating this snake - digesting it, absorbing it - could be a step in the right direction. Using the side of my fork, I slice the pot sticker open, releasing a ghost of steam, and lift the morsel to my lips.
It's hot and bland on my tongue. I taste nothing, not even the chutney. But when I blink, I see the meat regenerating into a diamondback that will live enveloped in my intestines, eating what I eat, dreaming what I dream.

In Masha Gessen's "Autocracy: Rules for Survival", she applies what she learned living in the Soviet Union and under Vladimir Putin to our current democracy under Trump, distilling some crucial lessons and why they must be heeded into six simple but powerful rules. It's a slick, smart, straightforward, absolute must-read of a piece. Here, rule #6 in its entirety:

Remember the future. Nothing lasts forever. Donald Trump certainly will not, and Trumpism, to the extent that it is centered on Trump's persona, will not either. Failure to imagine the future may have lost the Democrats this election. They offered no vision of the future to counterbalance Trump's all-too-familiar white-populist vision of an imaginary past. They had also long ignored the strange and outdated institutions of American democracy that call out for reform - like the electoral college, which has now cost the Democratic Party two elections in which Republicans won the minority of the popular vote. That should not be normal. But resistance - stubborn, uncompromising, outraged - should be.

In Stephanie Elizondo Griest's "Chiefing in Cherokee", she travels to Cherokee, North Carolina to explore and interview within the Native American community earning livings from cultural tourism. She has to confront her indignation at what initially appears to be exploitation and perpetuating common public misconceptions of tribal life and culture, especially of those buskers who pose for tourist photographs and are known as "chiefs". But this form of busking is defended by the chiefs, it's been done by generations before them, and she also has to consider her own relationship to her Chicana heritage. The essay goes much deeper into aspects of modern Native American and European-American cultural relations and economics, but suffice to say it's excellently done.

In David Kushner's "Land of the Lost", he relates the story of a tourist lost thanks to faulty GPS in Iceland, and ties it into the fascinating fact that our brains depend on this kind of location-tracking, mapmaking ability in order to keep the hippocampus strong and better developed. There are scary ramifications of depending on computer navigation instead of our brains' inherent systems for sensing and remembering locations and paths.

In "Unfriendly Climate", Sonia Smith profiles what must be the only Christian Evangelical scientist who believes in climate change and works aggressively to educate and change minds. That's Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist from Texas Tech University. Hayhoe's well-worded and easy to understand arguments for climate change-denying idiots are good to record and pull out anytime you encounter someone who actually wants to argue that scientific facts are opinions.

David Epstein's "The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene" details his experience of being contacted by a woman suffering from a form of muscular dystrophy that she had to fight and advocate on her own behalf to even be diagnosed with. She also identified similar elements in an Olympic sprinter, which was mighty odd and made Epstein initially skeptical, since the woman, Jill Viles, had sticklike arms and legs thanks to her failed muscles, and the Olympian, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep has such enormous muscles that she'd faced down accusations of using performance-enhancing steroids. I can't stress enough how fascinating this story is, and what far-reaching implications it has for patients being educated, informed, and able to advocate for themselves. And despite containing a wealth of potentially complex or dense scientific information, it's page-turningly readable.

Bomani Jones' "Kaepernick Is Asking for Justice, Not Peace" is another smart, important must-read, even amidst the wealth of recent think pieces about his choice of peaceful protest and Trump's asinine war against anyone who dares "take a knee" for justice.

I read and reviewed the 2016 Best American Series sampler last year, and it also covered many interesting topics, but I have to say that at least from the nonfiction side, this year's is simply excellent.

The Best American series is something that I look forward to every October. I love all the different genres and the guest editors. This is a must for anyone who would like to find out more about the series along.

As a long time fan of the Best American Series, I have seen good years and not so good, and so I choose which of the collections to read each year carefully. I've already read the Travel and Short Story volumes for 2017, and the selections in this sampler are among the very best essays and stories of those collections, in my opinion. And now I can see that I am going to have to pick up the Non-Required Reading and Sports volumes, based on the impressive quality of those essays. I had been planning on skipping the Non-Required Reading (after all, it IS Non-Required) but the Masha Gessen piece was too important to ignore. If the other writing in the collection is anywhere near that quality, it will be well worth the time.

This is perfect for those readers who enjoy a wide range of reading material. A selection of selections, "The Best American Series 2017" includes short stories, essays, mystery stories, nonrequired reading, science fiction and fantasy, travel writing, science and nature writing, and science writing about interesting and relevant topics. Great for those night when you just finished a book and want to read, but you are not yet ready to commit to another book!

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.