Books I read in April 2011
- The Secret History by Donna Tartt
- The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
- Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
The first two books I read this month were dividends from cleaning out the stuff Clarissa had still stored in Tennessee; our pretty-full bookshelves are now bursting with books she read a few years back, most of which are novel to me.
All three were breezy reads, easily slurped down dozens of pages at a time. For The Secret History, this was great because it’s a pretty long book! Technically less than 600 pages, the typesetting manages to cram a lot per page, making it closer to 800 pages in a traditional printing. It’s also very consciously… aestheticized? Tartt writes well, but in a way that makes you aware of the qualities of the writing—particularly the archaic elements, which give the book most of its specialness. Outside of them, it’s basically college kids bouncing off each other interspersed with occasional crushing on a girl and all powered by the murder clearly announced on page one. The archaic elements are there to drive the story on a superficial level, but don’t actually interact much with the real functioning of the book.
Jeffrey Toobin wrote—and still writes?—for The New Yorker, and The Nine borrows a lot from that publication’s house tone. It’s about the Supreme Court, and specifically about a lot of the extra-judicial elements that have affected decision-making throughout the years. It styles itself a sort of insider work of journalism and storytelling, but Toobin’s real game is far more subtle: mounting evidence for something called Critical Legal Studies.
Mentioned half-dismissively at the beginning, Critical Legal Studies argues that law is inherently political, judges (and petitioners) are not abstractly rational, and extra-legal elements play a significant role in judicial decisions. Sometimes this is just biographical elements that led each judge to their particular judicial ideology, but sometimes it goes down to details to how decisions were drafted and votes were won. This has a sort of “well duh” quality when you look at how decisions often /[aren’t]/ 9-0, but it raises a lot of difficult issues in the philosophy of law and a lot of people like to pretend it doesn’t exist. Toobin does a good job at pressing its case, but not quite as good as he could have done by mentioning it explicitly.
Wittgenstein’s Poker is ostensibly about a meeting between the philosopher’s Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, but mostly digresses to paint an interesting portrait of pre-Nazi Vienna and how Anschluss destroyed that wonderfully fertile environment of thought. It does a pretty good job of contextualizing everything—from the main players’ biographies to the surrounding culture and historical and political events—but never really gets anywhere. Part of this is me already being familiar with most of the meat of the book, but it is also the poppiest of pop-history. It is a really quick read, though, being less than 300 pages and the opposite of The Secret History when it comes to typesetting.
Out of the three, I’d wholeheartedly recommend The Nine, preferably supplemented by Ronald Dworkin’s writing for The New York Review of Books. Wittgenstein’s Poker is worth reading if only for the hilarious Wittgenstein anecdotes; for a more passionate paen to pre-Anschluss Vienna, look to Clive James’ excellent Cultural Amnesia. As for The Secret History, if you want a REAL book dealing with antiquity and murder, you should tackle Umberto Eco’s In the Name of the Rose instead. Don’t worry, the first 100 pages are supposed to be boring and after that it gets awesome.
In May, my big challenge will be consistently reading in the evenings; most of these three were read on non-workdays, and I won’t have many of those next month. Plus I have to move around Memorial Day weekend, in the midst of nine consecutive workdays. Yuck.
You can track my reading progress on Goodreads. I also end up tweeting about my reading in a lot less formal fashion. I also tweet other bookish links and nerdy stuff too! Plus moon-related polemics.
