- Sue Kwong
One of the greatest pleasures of reading is not just the act of getting a chance to explore someone else’s brain and someone else’s world for a while but also emerging from a book and arguing about it with somebody else. The Seminary Coop was, last Saturday, kind enough to give some of the Greatest Chicago Book tournament judges and readers a forum for an hour-long argument.
I thought about it some more as I drove home (up Lake Shore Drive, which is not gritty or proletariat, but still one of the most glorious Chicago things I can think of), and I realized that almost all the books in this tournament have this quality in common: the people who wrote them know—or knew—Chicago extremely well and described the city they knew. This goes beyond a mere sense of place; how hard is it to describe the lake anyway? (And yet, we get so pissed when writers who clearly know nothing about Chicago make an attempt at it and get it wrong.) Some, like Isabel Wilkerson and Upton Sinclair, learned it by research and reporting. Some, like Studs and Royko and Algren, learned it by talking to as many people as they could. Some, like Sandra Cisneros, Stuart Dybek, and Audrey Niffenegger learned it just by growing up and existing here. And others, like Aleksandar Hemon and Chris Ware and Jane Addams, arrived as adults and fell in love.
