- Sue Kwong
This winter, the Reader has set a humble goal for itself: to determine the Greatest Chicago Book Ever Written. We chose 16 books that reflected the wide range of books that have come out of Chicago and the wide range of people who live here and assembled them into an NCAA-style bracket. Then we recruited a crack team of writers, editors, booksellers, and scholars as well as a few Reader staffers to judge each bout. The results of each contest will be published every Monday, along with an essay by each judge explaining his or her choice. The Reader reader who best predicts the judges’ rulings will win a trip to Mexico.
And then something happened. I began reading. First up was Working. Terkel’s introduction is masterful: smart, pointed, poetic; right away I’m in good hands. “This book, being about work, is by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body.” After enumerating the violations—ulcers, accidents, shouting matches, fistfights, nervous breakdowns—he adds, “It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. . . .”
And then something happened again. I went back to Working, pushing through to the finish, and the book began to reassemble itself in my mind, the pieces sorted out differently. The weight of accrual set in. The litany of loss, yearning, bitterness, pride; large and small fulfillments: together they acquired considerable heft. The steelworker wants to make his imprint, and the firefighter echoes, “It shows something I did on this earth.” Such sentiments are quotidian and mythic.
