Note to Self: Good Books Worth It

By Scott Smith in Arts & Entertainment on May 17, 2005 5:14PM

Chicagoist is kicking ourselves for not attending the Chicago Public Radio-sponsored reading with Scott Simon this past Sunday. But, man, it cost 20 bucks! As we've been back at work and fiddling around on the internets this week, though, we're starting to realize that it probably would have been worth it.

Simon, a Chicagoan and host of NPR's Weekend Edition, has a voice that Chicagoist's roommate can't stop talking about. On Sunday, he read from his new novel, Pretty Birds, and we hear it's pretty good. As a journalist, Simon covered the Bosnian War, and Pretty Birds is a fictional examination of a young woman he interviewed amidst the siege of Sarejevo. Irena Zaric is a half-Muslim 17-year-old basketball-star-turned-sniper and, well, we're hooked right there.

Pretty Birds is Simon's first novel, but we're pretty confident from hearing him on the radio and reading some stellar (scroll down) reviews that he's more than just a pretty voice. For some reason, we haven't heard a lot of clamoring about Pretty Birds around Chicago, even though Simon is one of ours and we're totally itching to read what looks to be an engaging piece of historical fiction with plenty of current sociopolitical significance. So we're going to spring for it this week, even though we're usually totally cheap and tend to wait for paperbacks. Heck, on Amazon, it's cheaper than Sunday's reading.

Image via Amazon.

Thanks, Kristin!