Voices from the Storm: The People of New Orleans on Hurricane Katrina and Its Aftermath

As ashamed as I am to say it, this oral history, Voices from the Storm, is something I'd usually never pick up at a bookstore, and the only reason I got it was because it was on sale for $5.00 at Timothy McSweeney's garage sale. Once I received my copy, however, the stories absorbed me within the first ten pages. The meticulously edited interviews with fourteen survivors of Hurricane Katrina--young, old, single, mothers of nine, black, Arab-American, American Indian, white--were compelling not just for the stories they were telling but also the way in which those interviewed spoke. Many of the interviewees' very poor education hadn't even equipped them with the vocabulary to describe the atrocities they witnessed. The surprising variety of their stories amazed me also: one man, after weeks of rescuing neighbors and strangers, was arrested and held in jail without bond or a phone call under suspicions (unfounded and racist) of terrorism. (For more on this man Abdulrahman Zeitoun, explore Dave Eggers' recent work of nonfiction, Zeitoun.) Many families were stuck in New Orleans' infamous housing projects; one man was wrongfully imprisoned for a traffic violation the night before the storm hit and was trapped inside his cell when guards abandoned the prisoners. Each story is affecting in its own way, and definitely allowed me to better understand the magnitude of the suffering Katrina--and, to a large extent, the U.S. government--inflicted upon hte residents of New Orleans.

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon

My dad gave me Maps and Legends because he'd read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (an essential for next summer's reading list) and loved Michael Chabon's prose style. I did too--at first his unbelieveably long sentences and the occasional archaic word threw me, but I soon adapted and grew to admire the individuality of his writing. Maps and Legends is a collection of essays--Chabon's first--and one worth reading. The collective theme of the book lies in its subtitle; Michael Chabon is writing in defense of borderlands from literary to ethnic, on which he writes remarkably well, considering his passion for both genre literature and his Jewish heritage. The collection inspired me to add Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, to both The List and the hold shelf at the library; I hope to continue my foray into Michael Chabon's writing.

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!