The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon

This novel has garnered a kind of ridiculous amount of area praise for its part-time setting: the city of Chicago. I'll admit that it was pretty cool to read about the main character, Brik, grabbing coffee at the Kopi Cafe in Andersonville and meeting his wife on the steps of the Art Institute, but most of the story took place in Eastern Europe; Brik hails from Sarajevo.


I'd read reviews (stellar) and seen it in various bookstores for months, but what really motivated me to grab The Lazarus Project from the OPPL was the fact that Hemon was going to be in conversation with Joseph O'Neill (author of Netherland) at next weekend's Printer's Row Lit Fest, and I happened to snag two tickets.

Problem: I didn't like the book. Something unknown motivated me to finish it, but my primary issue--a rare one for me--is that I didn't enjoy Brik's company or his outlook. His marriage is a failure, he has no confidence in himself as a writer (he's researching for a book about the 1908 murder of Lazarus Averbuch by the then-Chief of the Chicago Police Department), and for most of the book, he is sunk in a deep depression. I think I might've enjoyed The Lazarus Project more had I not begun it on the same day I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The prose styles of each author couldn't be more different; I had created such a connection with Diaz's Yunior, and the connection was severed by Hemon's Brik. His sentences contain a unique beauty (interestingly and impressively enough, Hemon is a recent learner of the English language), but their subject matter didn't enthrall me the way Diaz's did. I'd say it was just too quick a transition from a book that I have yet to stop thinking about; I may have made a mistake by using The Lazarus Project as a "rebound" book.

The First Amendment

I've realized the error of my ways and have come to the conclusion that I have no choice but to revise my summer reading list. I forgot so many books and want to feel as if I'm making some headway, so here it is, in full, as of today: Saturday, May 30, 2009.

Amendment #1:
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolano
Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs
The White Album, Joan Didion (and/or other Didion)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
Chicago Stories, various authors

There we go. I accidentally began rereading one of my favorite books last night, so it may be a couple of days before I get to another one off the list, but I feel better having admitted my lack of loyalty to the original list. Another confession to make: I treated myself to a hardcover Everyman's Library edition of Lolita (again from Barbara's), despite the public library having the same copy on hold for me right now... I couldn't help myself. Oh well; it was $20 of my hard-earned babysitting money well spent.

Besides the two books I have paid full-price for, I've been doing pretty well for myself picking up books for quarters at garage sales around the Chicagoland area and at the Brown Elephant Resale Shop on Harrison Street in Oak Park. Proceeds from the Brown Elephant go to the Howard Brown Health Center, which has provided health care and wellness programs for LGBT persons across the U.S. since 1974.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz

Normally, I'm a sucker for elegant, poetic prose; in most books I've loved, the plot has been a secondary concern. However, the first thing I did after turning the final page of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was to copy my favorite sections into a notebook and slide the title onto the shelf I reserve for my favorite books. I couldn't put this novel down. On the cover of my paperback edition, Michiko Kakutani called Diaz's writing style "adrenaline-powered prose," and I couldn't erase her unbelievably apt description from my head. The narration almost harries the reader, but never failed to maintain my complete absorption; I came to intimately know and envision every character in my mind's eye; I developed a new interest in the history of the Dominican Republic. I'd recommend, highly, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to anyone, from a fiction-avoider to a college English professor.

I'll also say here that if you ever run across an opportunity to hear Diaz read or speak, take advantage of it. He read from Oscar Wao in Gannett Auditorium at Skidmore College and, despite his Pulitzer, the turnout was disappointing. He was as hilarious and irreverent as the narrator he created in Yunior, and made it a really good time.

Zoology, Ben Dolnick

A post chronicling yet another impulse-buy curtailing my progress on The List:

I picked up an advanced readers' edition of Zoology at Unique Thrift Store based entirely upon two facts: 1) It would cost me $0.33, on sale, and 2) The cover featured an endorsement by Jonathan Safran Foer, who I named as one of my favorite writers in my last post. It was a very quick coming-of-age read that allowed me to deviate from The List for just a day, and was ultimately a fine debut for the young Dolnick. It seemed the teensiest bit predictable to me; but then again, I'd imagine it to be a difficult feat indeed for a writer as young as Dolnick to produce a debut as widely-heralded as Adam Langer's Crossing California--which is what I expected Zoology to mimic. I appreciated certain turns of phrase, but Dolnick's style was a bit too sparse for me. Unique, certainly, but underdeveloped as well. The novel's protagonist, Henry Elinsky (a character who seemed a bit too autobiographical for my pure-fiction-loving comfort), describes his first love with amazing accuracy; perhaps it was this theme that justified Foer's analysis: "Ben Dolnick is a writer of incredible sensitivity. Zoology exploes the tricky journey to adulthood with honesty, humor, and generosity." My favorite sections were two, again near the close, in which Dolnick described Henry as he searched for Newman, the lost Nubian goat, or Henry on another similarly farfetched young-adult-novel adventure, and would chronicle his interesting, often irrelevant, thoughts in italicized parentheses. It was here that Dolnick best captured a nascent adult's perceptions of the world--a task that I felt was attempted throughout the entire novel. At one point near the book's end, Henry realizes, "My problems were as ancient and as beautiful as icebergs" (228), perhaps summarizing the book's essential subject: the passage from the prematurely world-weary realm of the teenager into adulthood. Zoology was a bit disappointing, but because of its brevity, I don't regret taking the time to read it.

I've been deviating markedly from my original summer reading list, but have been getting to a lot of good books via the Oak Park Public Library. I just picked up Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and The Lazarus Project by Aleksander Hemon, two books I'd had on hold at the library and in my mental reading list for quite some time. I've also just begun The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, the book that launched The List in November when Diaz came to speak at Skidmore College. Away for a weekend at the farm in Wisconsin, I hope to get through a couple of these books before beginning a classic. I'm feeling Dubliners coming on...

The View from the Seventh Layer, Kevin Brockmeier

Running around downtown Oak Park with a list of errands, I stopped into Barbara's Bookstore at Marion and Lake, and I, of course, left with a book. It's a dangerous world we live in; The View from the Seventh Layer set me back $14.95, but I just couldn't resist the Vintage Contemporaries edition (a true weakness of mine) and doubted I'd find a copy at a resale shop anytime soon.

I was turned onto Kevin Brockmeier after reading "The Year of Silence," a short story of his that appeared in Best American Short Stories 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie (which, by the way, is an excellent collection--a wonderful birthday gift from my friend Sarah). The stylistic elements of Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer come through in many of the stories Brockmeier has included in The View from the Seventh Layer, his most recent collection of short stories; Brockmeier tends towards the fantastical much more often, though. Krauss and Foer, the reigning power couple of Brooklyn's literary scene, hold the top two spots on my list of favorite authors, and I was hoping Brockmeier could climb the same mental pedestal on which I've placed Krass and Foer.


While I enjoyed the book overall, individual stories appealed to me more than others and I found that I appreciated the author's meditations on mystery and philosophy more than the fantastical and futuristic. Four of Brockmeier's stories are titled "A Fable..."--the most lasting stories probably being "A Fable Containing a Reflection the Size of a Match Head in Its Pupil" and "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets." In the latter story, a man unknowingly purchases God's overcoat at a thrift store and begins receiving prayers on notes that appear in the coat's pockets. It is this brand of romantically-magical realism that I admire in Krauss' Man Walks Into a Room and The History of Love; "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets" was exactly the kind of story I anticipated from this collection.

I've checked out a novel of Brockmeier's, A Brief History of the Dead, in order to read more of his writing. The View from the Seventh Layer convinced me to stay tuned for more of Kevin Brockmeier's work, but did not incline me to crown him a budding favorite author of mine.

The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs

I will admit here that I predicted Jacobs' 332-page memoir of his year as a Biblical literalist to fall into the same category as Bill Maher's Religulous, and that I was proven wrong. I saw the Maher documentary when I was halfway through The Year of Living Biblically (2007), and condemned it as an immature way of proving the point with which I anticipated Jacobs to conclude: that religious fundamentalism is ridiculous and only for the simple-minded. However, by the end of Biblically, Jacobs--a 38-year-old Manhattanite and editor of Esquire magazine--has become not only refreshingly un-jaded, but also a follower of those Biblical laws that should matter most: He is grateful, goodhearted, and conscientous. Jacobs does not criticize those who manipulate the scripture, rather he says:

...there's nothing wrong with choosing. Cafeterias aren't bad per se... The
key is choosing the right dishes. You need to pick the nurturing ones
(compassion), the healthy ones (love thy neighbor), not the bitter ones.
Religious leaders don't know everything about every food, but maybe the good ones can help guide you to what is fresh. (328)

Jacobs' writing is not the most innovative, and around Day 120 I put the book down for longer than I should have, but the insight the author gleaned from particular Biblical passages kept me engaged. Overall, I'd recommend this book to anyone in need of a Bible 101 crash course, a few laughs, or a light--and enlightening--summer nonfiction read.

Stuff I've Been Reading

In The Believer, Nick Hornby wrote a monthly column entitled "Stuff I've Been Reading." In it, he chronicled his experience as a buyer, reader, and general hoarder of books, listing the books he bought and the books he actually ended up reading each month. Hornby's columns can be found in the September 2003-August 2004 issues of The Believer, published by McSweeney's, or in two collections: The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. The Dirt.

As I am currently unemployed for the summer and am anticipating the necessity of an intellectual project, I'm going to imitate Hornby and begin my very own "Stuff I've Been Reading" column, published here, in a decisively less public forum than in The Believer. I suppose I'll begin with my summer reading list(s). I've got leftovers from 2008 and a nascent one in the back of my notebook for 2009. Here they are, combined:

THE LIST
1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Dubliners, James Joyce
Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, I.B. Singer
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
The Immoralist, Andre Girde
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Plays Well with Others, Allan Gurganus
The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Bruno Schulz
The Tin Drum, Gunther Grass
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
White Teeth and On Beauty, Zadie Smith
The Year of Living Biblically, A.J. Jacobs

It's easy to see that my list runs heavy on the "Books to Read Before You Die"; as a rising junior English major (and nerd, apparently), it stresses me out that I might not have read every classic piece of literature before graduation. Thus, The List.

To start off my quest, I checked out The Golden Notebook, Plays Well with Others, and The Year of Living Biblically from my trusty Oak Park Public Library this morning. I had the last book of The List recommended to me on Friday night by a friend, after telling her I'd taken a course in "The Bible as Literature" this past semester at school. I wrote my final research paper on Biblical translations and their effect on literalists' view of homosexuality, prompting her suggestion of Jacobs' book. As for the Lessing and Gurganus choices, I read "To Room Nineteen" and "Thirteen Feet of Water in My House" in an English course this Spring and was intrigued by Lessing's style and the topic of the Gurganus novel.

I've got some unpacking to do, and am starting my volunteer job at the Ernest Hemingway Museum this week, but I hope to get a taste of the Bible book and at least one other before the boxes and boxes of books I shipped home from school arrive and distract me. Wish me luck!