Globe Corner Blogs

Millennium park - photo by Jess

Too broke and busy to travel abroad, I instead took three small trips around the country this summer.

It took the Pitchfork Music Festival to get me there, but I finally visited Chicago! I’ve talked about visiting Chicago for four years; the first two years I was promising to visit my best high school friend at U. Chicago, the latter years promising to visit my best friend from college. I was certain a trip to Chicago would be my swan song, but I finally went to the Windy City in July.

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Fodor's Chicago 2009

Proper congratulations and looks of awe are in order: I flew from Boston to Chicago and from Chicago to Boston with no delays, no cancellations, and no angry TSA officials–in February. Quite a feat in my book, given Boston’s recent proclivity to sudden snow storms and O’Hare’s almost constant state of behind-ness.

I was in the Windy City (which is rather windy, no matter where the nickname actually came from) for a writer’s conference. Despite seeing such amazing writers as Marilynne Robinson and Alexandar Hemon read, it’s needless to say that most exciting part of this conference, like any, happened outside the actual conference hotel. And consistent with my usual style of travel, it happened inside restaurants and bars.

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The Lazarus Project -by Aleksandar Hemon

After enduring an extremely brutal reading list for a class on genocide, I declared January to be a “happy book only” month for me.  But now it is February, and I can start reading about pogroms, political oppression, and mass graves again. The first book I read after my self-imposed “depressing book ban” was The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, and it became one of my favorites overnight.

Hemon intertwines two intriguing stories about Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who was shot by a Chicago Chief of Police in 1908, and a fictional, present-day Bosnian immigrant named Brik. Officially, Lazarus was declared an anarchist assassin, but Brik wants to discover what really happened. Continue Reading »