You can always find a reason for a road trip. Whether you've got your dead aunt strapped to the roof of the car, or you're pushing a VW bus across the country to get to a beauty pageant, or you're stuck in the backseat with a frisky, farting dog trying to find your grandfather's village which was wiped off the map during World War II, well, you're bound to get some good pictures for your Facebook wall out of it.

Everything is Illuminated tells the story of a Jewish vegetarian writer named Jonathan Safran Foer (how did the author of this book, the Jewish vegetarian writer Jonathan Safran Foer, cook up that character?), who is on a journey to find his grandfather's hometown and the woman who saved him during World War II. He's assisted by Alex, a Ukrainian translator with a loose grasp on the English language; Alex's grandfather; and their frisky, farting dog, Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. …show more content…
Jonathan Safran Foer was only twenty-five when Everything is Illuminated was published. (What are you waiting for?) It was a New York Times Bestseller, an Amazon.com Best Book pick; it won the National Jewish Book Award for fiction in 2001 and The Guardian awarded it their First Book Award in 2002. And then the book was made into a film directed by Liev Schreiber a.k.a. Mr. Naomi Watts and starred Elijah Wood and that guy from the Gypsy punk rock band Gogol Bordello.

But Foer didn't rest on his laurels. He then wrote Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was also made into a movie; Eating Animals, the book that prompted Natalie Portman to become vegan; and edited an English translation of the Haggadah, a Jewish tale as old as time. So, yeah, this guy knows his stuff when it comes to Jewish folklore, vegetarianism, and