I read fewer books last year than in any other year I have recorded (meaning since I started keeping a list at the start of college). I'd like to think this is entirely unrelated to the pressure of the 50 Book Challenge, but in any case, I am rather glad to be returning to a period of books as private and guilty pleasure. I will still blog about my readings a lot, I am sure, and still occasionally polish off a bad tome out of some misguided sense of guilt, but if I don't spend next New Year's frantically finishing a half-finished book on the game theory of administrative law, I will not be all that sorry.

Happy New Year to all. Now I, too, am off to celebrate.

When a co-blogger first saw that Jerry Mashaw had taken over a decade to turn his lectures into Greed, Chaos, and Governance he marvelled at the glories of tenure. I, for one, thought the book was very fascinating, and full of insights I wished I'd had in Admin Law. However, I do think that I will never again read a legal academic book without also reading its legal academic book reviews. Jonathan Macey has one in the Cornell Law Review (I think), and it is at least as good as the book itself. (Mashaw seems to think, in the end, that public choice theory yields almost no concrete answers to normative questions, as modern originalism-skeptics seem to think about originalism. Macey suggests that Mashaw is too hasty by half.)

[50 Book Challenge, Last Second Edition]

Captain Alatriste - Arturo Perez-Reverte
Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I found Captain Alatriste rather disappointing, mostly because there just wasn't much to the story. I suspect it suffers for being the first entry in a larger series, but in that case I don't understand why the publisher is bringing out the American translations at the rate of one a year.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is even slighter by length, but nevertheless feels more dramatically satisfying. It is rather like a distillation of everything Garcia Marquez has written, but one more explicitly hopeful, even sentimental. It somehow seemed like the appropriate book to be reading at the end of the year.

Having squeaked through to fifty books, I have to say that I'd be unlikely to participate in a similar exercise again. Despite the fact that I found reading about what other bloggers read over the course of a year a great source of book recommendations, I still couldn't shake the feeling that what I was writing was approximately as interesting as the index-card book reports my eighth grade teacher made us put together every week.

Now I'm off to eat a phrophylactic plate of pasta and see if I can figure out which of the many boxes scattered around my apartment is most likely to contain appropriate New Year's Eve party-wear.

Happy New Year's.

Despite spending two summers during middle school playing Magic The Gathering full-time in the library, more of my own allowances than I can remember on Decipher Star Wars cards and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (second edition) books, becoming an obsessive player of Mario 64 and Super Smash Brothers, and being good friends in middle school with 1996 Spellfire world champion Tim Tracey; despite also dabbling in miniatures games, Dragon Dice, Illuminati, Stratego, Civilizations I, II, and III, I never really read comic books during my otherwise geeky days.

That said, having just finished Alan Moore's and David Lloyd's V for Vendetta, I am beginning to wonder what else out there I have missed. (I also liked Watchmen, but those two, the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and the Superman White Issue are pretty much the only comic books I have ever read. (Not counting Calvin and Hobbes.))

[50 Book Challenge, Last-Minute Edition]

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Bachelor List - Jane Feather

The Kite Runner was billed as something of a topical look at the history of Afghanistan, but it's really more just the Amy Tan formula with male characters instead of female. (For those unfamiliar with Amy Tan, she's essentially written the same book detailing a complicated relationship between a traditional Chinese mother with a past and her Americanized daughter six or seven times). Which isn't really meant as a criticism - the story of Amir's relationship with his father and his servant's son Hassam is affecting without being cloying, and told simply but not naively, making it overall an enjoyable read.

Cryptonomicon I read mostly because I wanted to find out if I liked Neal Stephenson. The answer is largely yes, despite the fact that eight hundred pages in, he morphs from a gentler, more normal Kurt Vonnogut into a Tom Clancy clone to disturbing effect. In particular, he seems to be engaged in an undermining, or at least problematization of the idea of war as the highest expression and exclusive domain of what can be called the traditional ideal of masculinity. But having created a view of World War II as essentially won by geeks and secretaries, and a modern world where computers trump guns, he feels the need to turn his geeks into heroes, and his one strong female character into a swooning damsel in need of protection. What gives?

The Bachelor List starts off interestingly enough when a committed Suffragist finds herself romantically entangled with a member of Parliament who has made his name by bashing women's competence to exercise the right to vote. Sparks fly, the battle lines are drawn, and then, about two thirds of the way through, they simply agree to disagree, leaving one with the feeling that this is a doomed relationship.

I am a sucker for bad poker books. Even though it is co-written by Penn Jilette (the louder half of irreverent libertarian magician duo Penn and Teller), How to Cheat Your Friends at Poker is not particularly good. First off, it doesn't actually tell you how to cheat your friends at poker-- it sends you off to serious books to learn about second- and bottom- dealing, serious card marking, and so on. (The book does more or less tell you how to swip chips out of the pot when nobody's looking and to mark cards with your fingernail.)

The bulk of the book is not about strategies but style and swagger. Be shameless. Be amoral. Be friendly. Skip town a lot. Never win too much or too big. Never win with flashy hands. Always lose the last hand of the night. And so on. This is probably actually useful advice and probably actually more useful than learning how to deal seconds since I never actually intend to cheat my friends at poker, but still the whole book left me feeling more than a little unsatisfied, like I'd just read the chinese food of poker books.

The coolest thing about it is that if you take the book jacket off, the naked hardcover has a false spine, making the book masquerade as some boring tome about the history of poker.

[50 Book Challenge, Surplus Edition]

How better to spend the 90 minutes waiting at the DMV for a duplicate title application than breezing through Nicholson Baker's Vox? The basic premise is that the book is a transcript of a phone-sex conversation between strangers, and the specifics are too strange (but oddly resonant) for this post. I liked his later book, The Fermata, about a time-travelling rapist, much better. In the seat across from me, a young Korean woman was reading my once-favorite, The Fountainhead and chortling to herself uncontrollably.
[50 Book Challenge, Surplus Edition]

The Last Duel - Eric Jager
The Portrait - Iain Pears
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

Vacations are always a wonderful time to lay around and read, which is what I've been doing. The Last Duel I picked up on the recommendation of Eugene Volokh. It's a good story, but definitely more interesting as a story than as a work of history, as the author focuses more on the melodramatic aspects of the quarrel that led to the final official trial by combat in France than on some of the knottier historical questions that the documents perhaps raise.

The Portrait is something of a short story unwisely padded to fill out a short novel. The central conceit--the one-sided dialogue of a self-exiled painter confronting the critic that first made him successful than ultimately drove him from the London art scene--grows thin after the first fifty pages, and the twist ending was predictable within the first ten. Nevertheless, it wasn't as bad as all that sounds--the odd, striking turn of phrase did much to keep me reading.

The Historian follows three scholars--an historian of Dutch culture, his advisor, and his daughter--through an intertwined set of stories and sources to follow their overlapping searches for the tomb of Vlad Tepes, or Dracula, whom they all come to suspect is in fact undead. It's your basic vampire thriller, dressed up in pseudo-literary Eco-esque trappings, and rather improved for it, even though there's not much to the book beyond the sometimes convoluted story.

Lie by Moonlight - Amanda Quick
Resurrection Man - Sean Stewart

Lie by Moonlight was meant to be airplane reading, but turned out to be rather a disappointment even in that limited purpose. Mostly, the characters never seemed to come to life--in fact, they were all sort of indistinguishable.

Resurrection Man was much more worthwhile. It takes place in a world similar to that of Galveston--though the magic there came back after World War II, and co-existed better with the comforts of civilization. Rather, the conflict is focused on the more intellectual aspects of the conflict between reason and the irrational force of magic.

On the flight I read Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything, which has the unfortunate consequence of turning me ravenously hungry, especially when he went truffle-hunting in Puglia and experimented with frying french fries in horse fat.
Steingarten is basically an ecumenicaly, relatively bias-free incarnation of Calvin Trillin. He likes barbecue, but also good fruitcake, french bistro food, and so on. He is willing to spend a month microwaving fish fillets or avoiding all caffeine, alcohol, and carbohydrates-- nominally in search of a story for his magazine, but you get the sense that the spirit of science (and the hope for a new culinary discovery) also propels him.

Steingarten also introduced me some time ago to my technique for french-frying potatoes, i.e., avoiding the canonical double-fry by simply putting them in cold oil and then cranking up the heat. Raffi rejects this technique for reasons that have never been clear to me, but I can't see why anybody with a refrigerator would ever bother to fry, drain, and then fry again.

50 Book Challenge

The Palace - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Galveston - Sean Stewart

Don't read The Palace. Just don't. It's bad history interlaced with undramatic melodrama, and a vampire that doesn't seem to do anything, well, vampiric. Yeesh.

Do, however, read Galveston. Co-blogger Peter has been urging me to read this book for years, a suggestion that I inexplicably ignored, given that it took all of two pages for the book to hook me completely. Stewart imagines a world to which magical powers have suddenly returned, driving out the advances of civilization, and the contrast between the make-do world where sandals are made from old car tires and asparin is a precious commodity and the profligate, unpredictable forces of magic is very moving.

Do books of poetry count? After discovering the existence of Brad Leithauser's Alphabet book, Letter Creatures I had it shipped from another library. It is comparatively insubstantial (although it does have a lovely little number on extinct species called Exes). But this seems like the occasion to note that I was quite surprised to see how much the Amazon hoi polloi despite Leithauser's poems, since he is one of my favorite poets (now that Milosz is dead, possibly my favorite living poet). Like all good poets, he is hit and miss, but still--

On The Odd Last Thing She Did: "Brad Leithauser is the worst poet I've read in some time." " (H)is poems have no purpose, not even to delight, and they seem simply smug when they do bother to adopt a tone." "How boring to read a book of poems you know must have bored the poet himself."

On one of his novels, A Few Corrections: "It's like being forced to listen to the bar know-it-all, so in love with his own vocabulary and so convinced that everything he's saying is a gem of great wit, that eventually any sensible person can't help but yell, 'WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP!?'"

On The Mail From Anywhere: "He is a poet the same way Somerset Maugham is a thinker." (Which may actually be intended as a compliment).

At least they liked the (glorious!) Darlington's Fall.

[50 Book Challenge]

The Cardinal's Hat : Money, Ambition, and Everyday Life in the Court of a Borgia Prince - Mary Hollingsworth
The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips

The Cardinal's Hat is essential reading for anyone who has ever spent significant time wondering how a typical Renaissance palace was furnished, or what a nobleman's typical dinner would have included. I realize this is probably a fairly circumscribed group, and and am hence grateful that someone thought this book was worth publishing. It's a fascinating look at the day-to-day minutae of of the life of Ippolito d'Este, much more concerned with the cost of stabling a horse than the political conflicts between the Pope, Holy Roman Emporor, and King of France through which Ippolito moved.

The Egyptologist is a fun novel telling the intertwined stories of an Australian private detective's search for Paul Caldwell, the erstwile illegitimate son of an English brewer, and Ralph Trilipush's search for the tomb of the putative Egyptian pharaoh, Adum-hadu. Told through a series of documents produced by narrators who become more and more obviously unreliable as the story progresses, it's a fun exercise in reading between the lines, until the author wimps out and reveals all in the final few pages.

Lo's Diary - Pia Pera
King, Queen, Knave - Vladimir Nabokov

Having read Lo's Diary, I now understand why Nabokov's son made such a fuss over the publication of the book. It's not the violence done to copyrights, or Nabokov, or Humbert Humbert, it's the unsympathetic treatment of Lo herself that tries to do the most damage to the magic of Lolita. Pera's Lolita is by all appearances a thoroughly ordinary girl with a jarringly pretentious literary style. (One cannot argue that this was acquired from contact with the fervid sensibilities of Humbert as it antedates her first encounter with the character who has been recast as M. Guibert). She comes across as a poorly drawn stereotype of a young teenager--self-centered, silly, and undistinguished, without a single spark of real life to make up for her deficiencies. Reading Lo's Diary one is left with no understanding of how Humbert could ever have fancied himself in love with the girl, and without the belief that amidst his manipulations and perversions, Humbert cherishes genuine love for Lolita, the story falls flat.

King, Queen, Knave was the appropriate antidote for Pera's book. The sory is essentially Madame Bovary from the perspective of Leon, but Nabokov's satiric sensibilities transform it into a dark comedy rather than a tragedy.

Looking back over my 50 Book Challenge posts I suddenly discovered a numbering error. I noted that Freakonomics was my fifteenth book, but then forgot about it when it came time to blog about David Currie's Jeffersonians. This all ramifies down the posts, so what I have described as book Forty-Seven (The Time Traveler's Wife) is really Forty-Eight.

[50 Book Challenge, renumbering edition]

The Blue Sword - Robin McKinley

The Blue Sword is a pleasant if undistinguished fantasy novel inspired by the British colonization of India and their border conflicts with Russia - an enjoyably obscure inspiration. The story concerns a young Homelander woman sent to the edge of the Empire after her parents' death, and kidnapped and selected as the bearer of a magical sword.

Zorro - Isabel Allende
Wickedly Yours - Brenda Hiatt
A Deal with the Devil - Liz Carlyle
One Night for Love - Mary Balogh
Fallen - David Maine

I had high hopes for Zorro. Allende is (was once?) a good writer, and how wrong can a book really go with capes to be twirled and swashes to be buckled? Fairly wrong, the answer turned out to be. Zorro isn't so much bad as dull, but it's hard to imagine a worse sin for a swashbuckler. I'm still mystified as to how Allende managed this feat, but I suspect it might have had something to do with the fact that Zorro doesn't start engaging in his trademark exploits until the last eighty pages of the book, and also with the fact that it is revealed, shortly after she is introduced, that Zorro will not end up with the woman he's in love with for most of the story.

Wickedly Yours was not just bad, but downright evil. I picked it up entirely because the hero was named Lord Peter Northrup. I should have known that the extra r boded ill. The story involves an incredibly insipid heroine who decides to become a Robin Hood-type thief in order to save her brother. Lord Peter, in a stunning display of logic, catches her stealing and decides that he should marry her. The rest of the plot unfolds predictably. What most amazed me, however, is that not once, at any point, did any of the characters involved in the incredibly inept burglary ring at the center of the story ever express anything even as mild as uneasiness with their choice of theft as the means to assist the poor (despite the fact that several of these people were themselves fantastically wealthy). [Insert appropriate objectivist-themed rant here.]

A Deal with the Devil was a vastly improved reading experience, though that isn't particularly saying much. The plot involves a woman and her child hiding from an unspecified menace as the housekeeper for an absent owner's remote estate, with the expected initial antipathy and ensuing romance when said owner shows up to investigate the death of his uncle.

One Night for Love is actually good. The story starts with Lord Neville's marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Lauren, being interrupted by the arrival of Lily, his first wife, whom he believed killed in the Napoleonic wars. Though the two of them are in love, their different backgrounds (she's the daughter of a seargant) prevent their marriage from succeeding, and legal problems with their original marriage lead them both to question if love is enough to make a successful marriage. Mary Balogh is one of my favorite romance authors, mostly because her novels recognize that true love alone is seldom enough to resolve whatever difficulties are holding two people apart.

Fallen is an odd, but deeply enjoyable book that tells the story of Adam and Eve backwards, starting with Cain's son, and ending in the Garden of Eden. It's not much of a story--Cain feels that he's treated unfairly, Eve wishes her husband would be more of a man, and honestly they were both bored in the Garden anyways--but Maine's wit and his focus on the everyday details of survival, where the loss of two goats is a major tragedy, carry the story along. There is, of course, discussion of the problem of evil, but if it's mostly shallow carping, it's also mostly tangental to the pleasures of the story.

A few facts about travelling to Rome from New Haven: 1, it involves two rather long plane rides and at least four rather long train rides. 2, if you read all of the books you brought there is a Feltrinelli with a reasonably large and reasonably affordable (by European standards) set of reasonably current English-language books. 3, the lack of much access to the internet or any devious Netflix distractions gives me a craving to read, read, read on the flight back. The resultant post is rather long, but I must blog them as I read them, and since I have a wager riding on how many of books I read this year, let's begin:

First I read Steve Martin's Shopgirl, not actually mine but my brother's. I meant to see the movie which looked sweet, but was left behind and never got around to seeing it on my own. The book surprised me-- not because it had much literary merit or anything, but there are a few nice little razors tucked inside the candy.

The same night I read Michael Chabon's The Final Solution, which is Chabon's entry into the genre of Sherlock Holmes fan-fic. I was more than a bit amused at his suggestion in an interview in the back of the book that he was hoping his fame would leave people to discover Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (have our literary hierarchies truly become that fucked up?) but pleased by his reverance for the old man. [I can't read Sherlock Holmes fiction without thinking of Richard Posner's clever-- but utterly, utterly, wrong-- savaging of Holmes. Or as Posner calls him, "icy, didactic, condescending, inhumanly self-sufficient, and therefore (the speculations concerning Irene Adler notwithstanding) sexless Sherlock."]

Anyway, Chabon's Sherlock's main gimmick is that he is very, very, old, and I am a sucker for sequels generally and most especially for this Beowulf-style sequel where the hero is brought back for one last task that he is really too old to handle. Unfortunately, Chabon's Sherlock is not too old to handle it, everything gets wrapped up rather hastily, and in the end it is unclear why one should bother with the whole affair.

These short treats were followed by Tom Wolfe's thick, thick, I Am Charlotte Simmons. I seem to recall a general drubbing from the blogosphere back when the book came out, but I cannot now recall any of it, so I may be repeating some old thoughts here. My understanding was that Dupont U (the setting) is supposed to be Duke, but it has been rather implausible pushed up to number 2 in the USNWR ratings and moved north of the Mason-Dixon line, so I am unconvinced by the resemblance. It's really half Duke and half Yale. I actually thought the story was pretty good. Everything Prep was trying to be-- a tale of the loss of innocence, and how big academic ivory towers in the distance aren't always all they're cracked up to be.

But I confess I was confused by all of the eager blurbs on the back suggesting that Wolfe had laid bare everything that was wrong and immoral about modern society. Huh? to the extent the story had a moral, it seemed to be that people who have never really thought about or dealt with sex tend to deal with it badly when first thrown into the snakepit of college dating. But I would have thought the lesson was that it's probably better to cut your teeth while still harmless in high school, not that there is or ever has been any real reason to tame the college snakepit. Some very smart people get utterly distracted by their hormones or their internal demons and fail to cope. So it goes. "Don't worry, I hold nothing against you for squandering your gifts."

I started Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted at the beginning of the trip, but got bored and abandoned it. Eventually I turned back to it, but never really changed my mind. It's really just a set of short-stories strung only very loosely together by a less-sensible-than-usual premise. A few of the stories are brilliant or gut-wrenching, and the one brief stab at continuity is a good set of stories that might have made a good novel if Palahniuk had had the inclination. But he didn't, so they didn't, and the result is pretty much an incoherent mess.

Finally, with only a few hours before landing in New York (and with a long trip on the E, R, 6, and MetroNorth to look forward to), I started Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife. My roommate loved it, but the librarian at the law school wrinkled her nose at it because she thought it was too weird. Both were good signs.

The title character is Clare, who is married to Henry, who spends a lot of time elsewhere and elsewhen. The details and problematics of this are narrated alternately by Clare and by Henry in real-time, although the proliferation of multiple Henrys at multiple points in time make this complicated. Anyway, it is hard to explain why this is not just a gimmicky premise without giving away far too many things that happen throughout the book, so suffice it to say the results are stunning. I will grant that most of the previous books noted in this entry are fairly ephemeral fluff, but books like the Time Traveller's Wife are the reason I read books.

[50 Book Challenge]

Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and some Great Ways to Cook Them - Peter Kaminsky
The Courage Consort - Michel Faber

Pig Perfect is a fascinating ode to ham in its myriad of traditional forms, combined with with some tedious verbiage on the decline of traditional food, family farms, and so on (not to say that this stuff isn't important, though having several farmers in my extended family, I feel compelled to point out that a family farm is a deeply unfun business to run for reasons that extend far beyond the encroachment of factory-style producers). Under the influence of Kaminsky's descriptions of the beauty of a true ham, I almost felt inspired to locate one for Thanksgiving dinner, but then decided that a good one was out of my budget.

The Courage Consort is a collection of three short stories, all beautifully written, oddly plotted, and oddly touching. Having discovered Michel Faber with The Crimson Petal and the White, and been deeply disappointed by Under the Skin, it was nice to see that Faber seems to me more than a one-hit wonder as a writer.

The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde - Neil McKenna
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

I've always felt that Oscar Wilde was more interesting as a character than as a writer, and Neil McKenna's biography tended to reinforce this opinion (though, read purely as a story, it dragged in the middle as Wilde worked his way through a series of mostly interchangable lovers). McKenna tackles the question of the relationship between Wilde's work and Wilde's life head on, and makes the a convincing case that the former is genuinely better understood in light of the latter, given the myriad coded references to homosexuality that dot the texts. However, given the mores of the period, much of the evidence of who was sleeping with whom amongst London's turn-of-the-century aesthetes rests on allusions, coded references, and unreliable testimony, and I wish McKenna had been better about presenting the evidence he used to reconstruct Wilde's affairs so the reader could judge for themselves how much of the biography rested on likely speculations, and how much on more solid facts.

Never Let Me Go is the best thing Ishiguro has written at least since The Unconsoled, and possibly since Remains of the Day. As a novel, it's both beautiful and creepy, and a wonderful exploration of how hard humans work to make sense of even the most extrordinary circumstances.

Spindle's End - Robin McKinley
The Divine Husband - Fransicso Goldman

Since childhood, I've been utterly unable to resist fairy tale retellings, which at their best, can make those familiar stories seem strange and new again. Spindle's End is a retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, one in which Sleeping Beauty is transformed from a passive recipient of the evil godmother's curse to an active participant in the struggle to overturn her influence on the kingdom. It was enjoyable, but the flow of the story was marred by an odd switch, midway through, from the point of view of one of the fairy godmothers to Sleeping Beauty herself.

The Divine Husband, is an odd, epic sort of story set in an anonymous Latin American capital, describing the lives of two childhood friends, one of whom marries the country's brutal dictator, the other of whom has a child out of wedlock. Francisco Goldman can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to write magical realism or historical fiction, resulting in a hybrid that's often mystical without ever being magical, and for what is obviously a deeply researched historical novel, strangely detacted from actual historical context.

On Food and Cooking - Harold McGee

On Food and Cooking has to be one of the most fascinating (and useful) books I've read all year. The various chapters deal with different ingredients (dairy, fish, etc.) and discuss in exhaustive detail such questions as why fish smells fishy and why it spoils faster than other meats, why mayonaise works and what causes it to separate, and what distinguishes various varieties of basil. McGee is at his most useful when he describes the general characteristics of various ingredients and basic recipes--after reading him, I find it much easier to tell if a particular recipe is likely to be finicky or forgiving--and at his most interesting when telling the histories of various foodstuffs. After reading several of his medieval recipes, I felt inspired to try adding more spices like cinnamon and allspice to savory dishes. While I suspect only hard-core food nerds would want to read the thing cover to cover, it's also a really invaluable reference guide (though I wish the index were a bit better).

Sunshine - Robin McKinley

I'm a big fan of Laurell Hamilton's early Anita Blake novels, but the series has become an unreadable demonstration of the fact that there is such a thing as too much sex in a novel. Sunshine is my attempt to find a replacement source of vampire chick lit. So far as these things go, it's not bad, but it's not outstandingly good either. The story suffers from the author's failure to adequately define the rules by which her world operates, so the heroine is constantly discovering new, unexpected magical powers to get her out of difficulty. The result is a story that seems forced and arbitrary, rather than believable.

Casanova in Bolzano - Sandor Marai

Casanova in Bolzano is not so much a novel as an extended meditation on the nature of love set within a flimsy framing device. If that sounds appealing, you'll probably like the novel--Marai's thoughts on love, jealousy, old age and seduction are both reasonably thoughtful and reasonably witty--but if you're dubious, you're probably unlikely to get over the way Marai suspends the story for a third of the book to give a hereforto minor character a fifty page monologue.

When I bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez's new book-- Memories of My Melancholy Whores-- I had somehow thought that it was going to be the second volume of his autobiography, and I was very excited. I was wrong-- it's a new novella, but who cares?

What I want to know is, why is it Vladimir Nabokov who gets the bad rap for writing about child sex? The General in his Labyrinth, Love in the Time of Cholera, Of Love and Other Demons, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Innocent Erendira-- all of these books feature weird old men doing all sorts of speakable and unspeakable things to very young girls. Memories does too, although it is one of the best installments in the lot, at least partially because it's distinctly different, or maybe it's so much a bit of all of them that the take is truly fresh.

At any rate, the book is very small, and the type is very large, so it hardly counts as a book. Given that Amy and I are in a rather high culinary wager about who will polish off more books by the year's end, it only seemed fair to leave it with her this weekend, and I am sure she'll finish it soon.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling

I tend to agree that this is the best of the series since Prisoner of Azkhaban, though I also tend to disagree that Order of the Phoenix was all that bad. At any rate, I predict that I won't like the seventh as well. The ending seems to set up a pattern of irritatingly silly behavior on Harry's part that seems likely to mar the rest of the story. I'd much rather have tension in a book come from the villain's skill than the hero's stupidity.

Garlic and Sapphires - Ruth Reichl
The Epicure's Lament - Kate Christensen

Garlic and Sapphires managed to convince me that my dream job is not, in fact, food critic for the New York Times. It wasn't the accounts of the pretentious restaurants that failed to live up to their promise or the backbiting politics of the Times that convinced me, rather it was the bit where Reichl talks about guiltily hiding from her job by spending hours cooking in her kitchen. Not as good as the second entry in her memoir series (Comfort me with Apples, which I wrote about here), mostly because it doesn't convey the same sense of joie de vivre, but still very good.

The Epicure's Lament in subject matter sits at the same intersection of food, relationships, and class as Reischl's memoirs, Christensen's view of the gastronomic sensibility, and of life in general, is much darker than Reichl's essential take on the pure pleasure of good food. The story concerns Hugo Whittier, the failed scion of a decayed family fortune, and his efforts to smoke himself to death, while consuming good food and having sex with attractive (or at least available) women. Definitely worth reading.

In an attempt to pick up something vaguely relevant by Charles Black, I stumbled across his book on impeachment. The law library didn't have a copy when I looked, but near it on the shelf was Richard Posner's take on the Clinton impeachment, An Affair of State.

I have no real complaints about the book, although I had no real interest in learning more about the details of the impeachment and Posner's take on the whole thing, while iconoclastic, was relatively easy for me to predict. (The Supreme Court is too formalist and too ignorant of practical politics, the liberalization of sexual morality is not a bad thing, Clinton's opponents and defenders both went hyperbolically overboard, &c.) I was most surprised by his opposition to the possibility of censuring the president, both on pragmatic and constitutional grounds.

Still, it is a strength of Posner that even a book on a topic I had no particular interest in could consume my spare reading time for a week or two, to the exclusion of enticing tomes of fiction or my newly-recalled volume of Dorothy Parker's poems. What I would really like to read is a Posner review of Justice Breyer's Active Liberty. . . .

[50 Book Challenge]

A Feast For Crows - George R. R. Martin

I'm extrordinarily behind on my 50 Book blogging, and have a backlog of books read that I need to get posted sometime soon, but I'm going to jump the queue and write about the book I just finished.

In preface I should say that Martin is one of my favorite fantasy writers, and the first three books of his Song of Ice and Fire series were outstanding. So when I say that I found A Feast For Crows very disappointing, I don't mean that it's a bad book, just that it failed to live up to the high standards set by the first three in the series.

The major problem with FFC is that in almost seven hundred pages, nothing much happens. The majority of the characters in the book in substantively the same circumstances in which they started. Much of this feels like scene-setting run amok.

The secondary problem is that most of the point of view characters featured in FFC just aren't that interesting. Together Cersei and Brienne probably comprise the largest portion of the book, but neither is a particularly compelling person with whom to spend time. And there are too many new characters added in the Iron Islands and Dorne, so too much time is spent introducing them, but none of them are particularly well-developed or compelling.

What Martin really needed was a ruthless editor to cut the book by a third and let it incorporate the material from Dance of Dragons as originally planned.

(If you're wondering, my copy of FFC came from England.)

Carina and I recently had an argument about whether Lemony Snicket's new (and next-to-last) book was properly enjoyed sitting on a neatly made bed or while curled in a cramped coach seat on an overnight train out of Washington D.C. Since I snagged my copy from the awful bookstore in Union Station, I unsurprisingly defended the latter.

Anyway, it is hard to explain to the unitiated why these books are great, great in a way that Harry Potter will never be. The deliberately-too-complicated wordplay, the heavy-but-not-too-heavy irony, and so on. The books also get better at the series wears on and the relevant moral issues get more and more thick. The Slippery Slope marks the turn to what I think of as the "modern" era of the Baudelaire children, but the transformation here, and the very real question about whether they are as innocent as they purport to be, may be the best yet. Only one more book!

Interpreting State Constitutions, by James Gardner, is an incredibly promising but ultimately frustrating book. I have already made clear my interest in state constitutions, and Gardner begins by setting up an interesting dilemma. Most people who champion the notion that state judges should interpret state constitutions without worrying about contradicting the Supreme Court argue that because state constitutions are legal texts like any other, their analysis is as straightforward as any other. You look at the words in the text, at the meaning those words had at the time adopted, perhaps at the purposes, results, motivations of the text, at previous judicial interpretations of the text, and so on. What's so hard about that?

What Gardner points out is that most state court judges simply don't do this--despite all of the excitement about the "new judicial federalism," there just simply isn't very much of it. Perhaps because state judges are overworked and fear retention elections, perhaps because they are simply indifferent, perhaps for some other reason. Now my response to this problem is to ask what systemic changes states might make to their judicial systems to get a judiciary that will interpret their constitution, what different rules of procedure and prudence a state judiciary might develop to tackle the problem, and so on. Gardner's response is instead to dream up a system that actually justifies the current state of affairs.

Gardner's suggestion, which is interesting, is that state judges ought to basically see themselves as federalist watchdogs, "checking abuses of national power". Now, because of Ableman v. Booth, state court judges are largely unable to actually interfere with federal court proceedings, to release federal prisoners, etc. And because of the supremacy clause, they are unable to use state law as any sort of weapon against federal law. So what Gardner means by "checking abuses of national power" is that state court judges should step in to restrain state authorities when the federal courts fail to. This strikes me as very very strange semantically-- why should a federal court's failure to exercise its judicial power against a state government be termed an "abuse of power?" I would have thought that ab-use was wrongful-use, and that this presupposed use. Oh well.

Unfortunately, having laid his program out on the table, every step Gardner makes to try to justify it is pretty unpersuasive. But this is all the more frustrating because he constantly poses good questions before blithely failing to answer them and marching on by.

One example: As Gardner repeatedly concedes, the question before a given state court should not be whether in the platonic abstract, state constitutions must be interpreted in the way he envisions-- as licenses for atextual common-law judicial resistance to minimalist Supreme Court decisions. Rather, the question is whether any given state constitution does authorize the judiciary to do so. This is right. But the next step is to declare (without real explanation) that we ought to have a presumption in each case that constitutions should be interpreted according to the Gardner-theory, and allow this to be rebutted only when a constitution displays distrust of its judiciary.
I realize that this kind of burden-shifting is incredibly common, but I confess I do not understand its appeal.

A second and final example: Towards the end of the book, Gardner explains that before we know how to interpret a state constiution, we must know what the function of state constitutions is generally. At first blush I wondered why this didn't work the other way round. Surely to understand what the function of a given legal document is, we need to know what the legal document says. But more importantly, Gardner misses the possibility that different state constitutions might well have different functions, but that the best way to figure this out would be to figure out what the words in them mean in context. There is no need to have a political theory of federalism here.

First things first-- a note on semantics. Justice Stephen Breyer's Active Liberty, recently published to all the usual accolades, might mislead you with the title. The "Active Liberty" is not liberty in the modern sense but is rather the "liberty" to use state violence to force other people to do one's bidding-- that is, the right to govern. So far as word-usage goes, I have no objection to this-- "liberty" is generally understood at a high enough level of abstraction that it does only rhetorical work, but I thought I should make it clear.

So, Breyer's project is to show how legal texts (largely federal statutes and the federal constitution) can and should be viewed through the lens of "active liberty". This means, I think, remembering that people like to make laws, that the framers were lawmakers, that laws and governance can be good, and so on. The trouble with this, at this level of generality, is that it is such a vague directive that it's unclear what work it does. Breyer is pretty frank about this, and luckily he is quite willing to get down to cases. More on those in a minute.

First, a few more larger thoughts. Breyer's book has been billed as a response to Justice Scalia's A Matter of Interpretation. Unlike AMoI, however, Active Liberty does not include a section where sharp-witted and ideologically diverse scholars take shots at the book, or a reply to those shots. The closest thing is a counter-argument about the consequentialist values of originalism that Breyer erects and then shoots down (or at least fights to a draw). This is unfortunate. Breyer is very smart, so letting him fight gladiators not of his own making probably would have made his arguments work better.

Now, as I said, the trouble with simply interpreting the Constitution as generally promoting the end of Active Liberty (i.e., governance) is that the Constitution clearly pursued multiple ends, was approved by different people with different opinions of the proper balance between law, license, and liberty, and so on. So it is hard to know whether to object to the general program until it plays out.

Breyer plays it out across several areas, and I offer some objections.

1: Federalism. The catchphrase for Breyer here is "cooperative federalism." Sovereign immunity and the anti-commandeering doctrine are bad for federalism because they make it harder for the federal government to enact flexible national regulatory programs. Breyer concedes some benefits of decentralization, and sugggests that some of these decisions will have perverse effects. Indeed they may.

But why suppose that "our federalism" is supposed to be a cooperative one? Why not a non-cooperative federalism? We know that part of the genius of our structure of separated governance is the way it sometimes pits state against state, government against government. These conflicts have to be kept within certain bounds, of course, but within some range of dynamism, equilibrium, and tension, conflict between governments ensures that there is a space for individual liberty that might not exist if all of the vast power of the different governments teamed up on one side.

I don't mean to suggest that the federalist principles embedded in the constitution or other enforceable structural principles are necessarily non-cooperative rather than cooperative. The point is that it is quite plausible that they are both, or a mix of the two, and Breyer gives us no good reason to prefer one to the other, or even to view things through the lens that he offers.

2: In the chapter on administrative law, Breyer suggests that Chevron deference ought to be viewed through a What-would-Congress-do? lens. That is, courts should defer to agency interpretations if and only if Congress said they should, or, the court thinks that Congress would have delegated the question to the agency if it had thought about it. As an example, he says that "question(s) of national importance" are the kind of thing that Congress would have wanted to decide for itself rather than to defer. Why on earth should this be so? Breyer does not tell us, and it seems to me at least as plausible to suppose that over a large range of "important" questions, Congress would love to pass the buck to somebody else. This is surely why Congress regularly enacts very vague statutes-- preferring not to have to debate and vote on whether, say, Class 1 narcotics are immune to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act but to push the choice off on somebody else.

Again, there may be reasons to forbid Congress from delegating "important" statutory questions (important to whom?) to agencies, but the hypothesis that Congress as a whole loves to decide all "important" questions by roll-call vote is surely not such a reason.

3: When it comes time to consider what Breyer calls "A Serious Objection"-- the possibility of originalist textualism-- Breyer spends the entire chapter explaining why consequentialist defenses of either one are unavailing. Since the book explicitly acknowledges that literalists and textualists are not to be persuaded, this is fine with me. But Breyer cannot bring himself to leave it at that. Instead, he adds:

(T)he more "originalist" judges cannot appeal to the Framers themselves in support of their interpretive views. The Framers did not say specifically what factors judges should take into account when they interpret statutes or the Constitution. . . . Why would the Framers, who disagreed even about the necessity of including a Bill of Rights in the Constitution, who disagreed about the content of that Bill of Rights, nonetheless have agreed about what school of interpretive thought should prove dominant in interpreting that Bill of Rights in the centuries to come?

To count a book for the 50 Book Challenge, do I have to read every footnote? I think I did, but G. Alan Tarr's Understanding State Constitutions is chock-full of so many citations to so many different articles by people I have never heard of that it is hard to be absolutely sure. At some point, the eyes glaze.

Anyway, I like state constitutions. Roughly speaking, I think, there are three points of view on the enterprise of state constitutional law. There are those, most famously William Brennan and his followers, who seem to view state constitutions as the perfect place for Warren-Courts-in-exile. Brennan, indeed, used to explicitly urge state courts to carry on the torch for Warren Court interpretations of the federal constitution even once the Burger Court had turned its back on them. See Michigan v. Mosley, 423 U.S. 96, 120-21 (1975) (Brennan, J., dissenting); William J. Brennan. "State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights." 90 Harv. L. Rev. 489.

Then there are the roughly originalist state constitutionalists, who agree that state courts are empowered constitutional actors who ought to feel no shame about diverging from federal interpretations of similar provisions. If one believes that it is the original meaning of a legal text that binds, then obviously there ought to be differences between the state and federal provisions, since they are often different texts adopted by different communities at different times. And since many state constitutions are relatively new, there is a greater background of usage and constitutional dialogue to aid in originalist spelunking. See G. Alan Tarr, Understanding State Constitutions (1998); Randall T Shepard, The Renaissance in State Constitutional Law: There are a Few Dangers But What's The Alternative?, 61 Alb. L. Rev. 1529 (1998).

And then there are the folks who think that the whole enterprise is suspect, that state judges are yahoos, that state constitutions are jokes, and that any legal document that talks about ski trails simply cannot be taken seriously as a constitution. See Paul W Kahn, Interpretation and Authority in State Constitutionalism, 106 Harv L Rev 1147 (1993); James A Gardner, The Failed Discourse of State Constitutionalism, 90 Mich L Rev 761 (1991).

At any rate. I am a follower of Tarr and Shepard; state constitutions ought to have independent life if and only if they had independent meanings, independent histories, and independent epics. The trouble is that this inquiry is hard, and also that information about one clause in one state is only sometimes relevant to a similar clause elsewhere. To public-interest litigators and high-falutin' law professors at national law schools, this is bad news. How many people would rush to Barnes and Noble to buy We The People of the State of Connecticut or Connecticut's Constitution: A Biography?

Which brings me to my last complaint, which is that too many people at this law school talk about state constitutions collectively rather than individually. (A criticism that also applies to the first half of this post.) It is as if professors have gotten the hint that they should note that there are lots of constitutions, and note that they sometimes have independent interpretation, but having come of age in a time of state constutional silence, and having not invested much actual human capital in studying or writing about them, don't actually have anything concrete to say about the constitutions themselves. Someday, I hope, an enterprising lawyer or judge or academic will get Yale to let him teach a seminar like Constitutional Law: Connecticut.

While I am impatiently waiting for the next volume in David Currie's Constitution in Congress series (Descent Into The Maelstrom) to come out, it occurred to me that there were other Currie texts I could use to hold myself over. (I have already read all of his articles that have not been superseded by books.)

For example, The Constitution in The Supreme Court: The First Hundred Years. The book is what it sounds like-- an amazingly readable and largely complete tour through a century of constitutional decisions. The lessons are that John Marshall had a lot more lousy opinions than you would think, and Taney had a few more good ones; Waite was a surprisingly competent Chief Justice, and the dormant commerce clause appears to have simply baffled the entire bench to no end.

Given that I read Currie's Congress books first, it is strange to imagine that this Supreme Court history helped make his name. It is fascinating stuff, but even the likes of Miller, Waite, and Curtis pale in comparison to Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, or even George Badger. A government of laws and not of men, and all that, I guess.

[50 Book Challenge]

There is a great divide between land use planners about the optimal amount of planning; some champion more-or-less comprehensive scheming into the future, while others prefer to take challenges as they come, or "muddle through". Of course, this divide exists in life, too. Witness the characters of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down.

Our Girl in Chicago hated it; I thought it was not bad-- not up to the laugh-out-loud-and-squirm-with-recognition level of High Fidelity, but then again I have never been tempted to throw myself off of an 11-story building, so there may have been some absolutely apt characterization that simply passed over my head.

The gist of the story is that four people plan to kill themselves, then meet, then get distracted, and start pushing the ultimate date off into the future. [I won't spoil the book by saying who pushes who off of what, or who dies in the end.]
Part of what makes this book less satisfying is that Hornby and his characters are muddlers-through. The book lacks an overarching scheme or design (think the anti-John-Irving) and so might credibly be criticized as lacking an ending. Or a middle, really.

I levelled exactly that criticism at co-blogger Amy's beloved Cat's Eye when I read it years ago. Now I am beginning to warm to it.

At a suggestion, some time ago, from Marty Lederman, I began reading just about everything I could find by Charles L Black (whose portrait in the law school I have come to pass almost as often as Alexander Bickel's). This project has more-or-less culminated in Black's book (three lectures, really): Structure and Relationship in Constitutional Law.

Like most everything I've read by Black it is both novel and prophetic, fabulously written, persuasively argued, and basically wrong. The two fundamental arguments of Black's book appear to be 1, that federal courts ought to strike things down (chiefly state-level things, not federal-level things) even when they offend no legal text, on the basis of ahistorical atextual inferences from some unexplained and contested view of What It Is To Be A Nation and 2, that while there are indeed legitimacy and countermajority problems with judicial review of federal action there are absolutely none with respect to federal judicial review of state laws:

There simply is no problem about the fundamental legitimacy of judicial review of the actions of the states for federal constitutionality. Article VI says as much, literally and directly.

When I was in pre-school and kindergarten, my favorite book for bedtime stories was the Facts-on-File World Atlas. I didn't just want it read once, but over and over again (we wore out at least two copies). In high school calculus I used to ignore the lectures because I was too busy reading the 2003 and 2004 World Almanac.

So I guess it should be no surprise that I quite liked A.J. Jacobs's The Know-it-all, which is his account of his attempt to read the Encyclopedia Britannica (macro- and micro- pedias).

I will spoil the ending by telling you that he makes it. Along the way he relates not just a lot of fascinating trivia but also interesting discussions about the role of knowledges versus intelligence, the insecurity he feels around people who are smarter than him, and the nontrivial strains that his project puts on his marriage.

I got the book from my brother for my birthday; I think his penchant for useless trivia is even stronger than my own.

The Washingtonienne, by Jessica Cutler, and Belle de Jour, by the pseudonymous Belle de Jour, have a lot of common. Both are books about sex, and essentially the novelizations of sex-blogs. Both authors are shamelessly and happily promiscuous and have sex for money. The Yale library system carries neither book and I was forced to acquire them through Borrow Direct, and finished them in the past 48 hours.

But there are also important differences. Jessica Cutler is known by her real name, was exposed and fired before negotiating her book deal. Belle de Jour won the top blogging prize in the Guardian, and continues to be happily employed, and anonymous; many speculate that she does not actually exist and is a front cooked up by some clever novelist. Cutler worked as a staffer on the Hill, having sex for money only as a part-time recreation. "Belle" is a full-time professional whore ("It's simply a label; go with it, have fun with it," she writes.) Cutler is mildly annoying and not a particularly good writer-- think Lee Fiora with more sexual aggressiveness and a lot less shame. Belle, on the other hand, is witty, clever, and much less of a huffing bimbo about her place in the world. For those who strongly oppose prostitution on grounds of sexual morality, I suppose this will be taken as a sign of the falling sky, but it definitely makes her book the better one.

As I said above, Yale doesn't seem interested in buying either book, so I had Columbia's sent here. (I owe thanks to PG, who is responsible for getting Columbia to order a copy.) Here are PG's extensive thoughts on the book. I agree with her final suggestion that you should get your library to get a copy of Belle's book, or perhaps buy a paperpack if you can, but don't spend Amazon's $17 on it. Or, of course, you could go read the blog itself. Don't bother to read The Washingtonienne at all.

[50 Book Challenge]

On Amy's suggestion, I acquired Kelly Braffit's Josie and Jack from the library today. I finished it the same day, and with time left over in the day for baking pistachio bread, swearing endlessly at Netgear and SBC, and taking a trip to the beach. Which is to say, it is not a long book, and because it is fun, it flies by.

Well, it is fun if your idea of a fun book is an excess of drugs, theft, quasi-interest and deeply confused childhood: something like Nabokov's Ada but twice as readable and less than one tenth as sexy.

Anyway, I quibble with Amy's earlier post. She mysteriously refers to Josie and Jack as children of privilege: their father is a crazy math/physics professor at a 4th-tier regional college who home-schools his children in a decaying old house dozens of miles from Pittsburgh. There is no evidence that the family has any money (and quite a bit of evidence that they have little), and the only "privilege" that the title Js seem to enjoy is being able to smoke mediocre marijuana all day rather than attend school. This is mere license.

Also, Amy complains that sometimes real-world consequences intrude on the main characters, but sometimes they get off scot-free. It is hard to go into specifics without spoiling the whole book, but it seems to me that there's a method to the madness. Consequences that involve, say, law-enforcement authorities, pretty much never happen, while consequences that involve, say, biology, are pretty darn inexorable. Which is pretty much the same message that Josie and Jack's crazy father was trying to drill into them when they were growing up.

[50 Book Challenge]

I bought Curtis Sittenfeld's “Prep” for two reasons. First, a friend had mentioned recently that he was reading it, so I noticed it when I walked by it on the shelf. Second, the main character, Lee Fiora, begins the book by escaping her hometown of South Bend for a New England boarding school, and at the time I was standing in a South Bend bookstore hoping to find some way to get to school in New England.

I generally do not demand that the characters in the fiction I love be good people. [Van Veen is an evil, abusive, sex criminal. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can’t find their way out of a paper bag. Dirk Gently is a rude slob.] Nonetheless, a certain kind of character can rub me in a way so wrong that it ruins the book.

Lee Fiora is almost that character. She is not particularly bright, has no special talents other than oral sex and cutting hair, and spends most of her life being miserable. Far worse, she is whiny about all of this, and seems uninterested in trying to better her lot. Nonetheless, for reasons I don't entirely understand, her endless whining did not stop me from staying up until 5:00 last night to finish Prep.

Maybe this is because the author's heavy hand with foreshadowing makes you genuinely curious what will happen next. Maybe this is because I am a sucker for this genre, broadly defined (which ranges from The Secret History to Chloe Does Yale). Or maybe this is because Lee reminded me of a disturbing way of myself-- like Lee, I worked hard to get admission to what I thought be a special educational opportunity (in my case, a study abroad program in Cambridge England). Like Lee, I realized after getting there that it was not what I had wanted or expected at all. Unlike Lee, I responded by getting the hell out and returning to Chicago, rather than sitting around in self-pity and loneliness. One makes one bed, but does not always have to keep lying in it.

There is one nice thing to be said for being suddenly forced to abandon one's car in northern Indiana and take to the skies. All of that sitting around at Jordan's Volvo and the South Bend and Cincinnati airports gives one a great deal more free time for reading.

For example, I picked up and breezed through Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. If Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires is the sort of thing to make you want to become a professional restaurant critic, Kitchen Confidential is the sort of thing to make you never ever want to become a professional chef. Or to let one anywhere near your kitchen. Or your friends. Bourdain claims the thing was written not for the sensationalism or even for the restaurant-going audience but merely for those who have worked in the restaurant biz. I am dubious. He must have known, or at least hoped, that his tales (Restaurants serve five-day-old fish! They save the worst parts of meat to be cooked "well-done"! They deep-fry them, too!) would titillate. And they do. The book is fascinating, in its own slightly dreadful way.

Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, on the other hand, is not at all dreadful, and it is just as fascinating. Everybody who writes about this book seems to feel all right revealing the central conceit, so I suppose I will too. The narrator and the main characters are all clones bred for the purposes of organ donation, but being fully sentient ensoulled human beings, have a rather complicated view of their own place in the world. As with Ishiguro's other characters (c.f. The Remains of the Day; When We Were Orphans) this sort of not-quite-self-conscious ruminating about their own complicated place in the world makes up pretty much the whole book. I agree with Amber that the book does it very very well, partly because the clones thoughts about their place in the world are surprisingly, well, complicated, rather than rote rebelliousness or total mindlessness.

But this is as good a place as any to take serious issue with her potshots at Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (see both her post on Never Let Me Go and to a lesser degree, on O & C itself). As I understand Amber's complaint, it is that Oryx and Crake is science-fiction, but it is trite science-fiction, where the ideas are unoriginal and already worked over by the better writers of the genre. If I am right that this is her complaint, it is quite wrong. Oryx and Crake is not science fiction, and does not try to be. It is instead a dystopia, a related, but importantly different, genre.

In science-fiction novels it might be fair to grade an author on how cleverly and creatively she can dream up new possible worlds, new inventions, new mysteries, new masteries, new horrors. But in a dystopia, the goal is not to shock readers with the new, it is precisely to use ideas that are already in semi-common currency, and show how close we are to a horrible new world. Where science-fiction invents, dystopia merely tries to remind; where science-fiction tries to show a world very different from our own, dystopia tries to show us how close we are to the precipice. It is, if you will, a reductio ad absurdum of the here and now.

Indeed, as Richard Posner pointed out in his able TNR review, Atwood's borrowings from the classic dystopias (and similar books) are obvious and sometimes overt: Orwell's "proles" are her "pleebs"; her intellect-castes come from Huxley; her pigoons come from Wells; and of course, her narrator is Robinson Crusoe, as the chapter titled "Footprint" makes quite clear.

In this Q&A she admits to the Orwell borrowings, while dancing around the question of whether her book is "real sci fi". In her essay on the book she is even more explicit:

Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper ... it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent.

Ishiguro explores ... what are we, what are we for, and does it matter that we are what we are and that we are for what we are for?

For the court-watcher, Becoming Justice Blackmun, by Linda Greenhouse, is a treat. The book is long on internal memoranda, bench notes, and Blackmun's legal pads, without getting into too much depth about the actual legal theories involved and without wandering off the deep end like Ed Lazarus's Closed Chambers. My only real complaint is that the book would have been better with a few foot- or end- notes. When Blackmun passed Scalia a note apologizing for how rough the 1996 term's decisions had been on Scalia, or when Burger passed Blackmun an exaggerated note during March 4, 1974, oral arguments, I found myself making marginal notes to find out what the full story was. I guess what I really would have preferred would be a book like "Linda Greenhouse's guide to the Blackmun Papers", which would probably have an audience of about 8.

[50 Books]

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow was billed to me as a book worth reading just because it is so very Chicago (it is the tale of Alan Bloom, the Closing of the American Mind, and dying). Indeed it is.

The book is also, in some fun way, the antimatter cousin of Umberto Eco's Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. Both are about old men reminiscing over lost friends as they face questions of death and memory of their own, but where Eco's Yambo is a rake, Bellow's Chick is only straining to become one. ("You need to F---ing assert yourself," Ravelstein (Bloom) tells him as he tries on a gorgeous green Fedora at a Parisian haberdasher). Eco wrote what he called the fictional biography of a generation. Ravelstein is just the fictional biography of a man who may have shaped one.

[50 Books]

Mirror, Mirror, Gregory Maguire
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, Umberto Eco

I've always loved fairy-tale retellings, like Beauty, by Robin McKinley and The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye. They make wonderful comfort reading, with simple, predictable stories enlivened (in the best of them) with witty deconstructions of favorite fairy-tale tropes. This is why I read everything Gregory Maguire writes, even though my experiences with his writing have been highly uneven.

Mirror, Mirror is a retelling of Snow White set during the Italian Renaissance, in which Lucrezia Borgia takes on the role of the Wicked Stepmother. After her father is sent off on an apparently futile quest by Cesare Borgia, his daughter Bianca finds herself at the mercy of the whims of the Borgia siblings, with predictibly unpleasant results. She ends up with a group of odd stone dwarves, whose relationship to men is never particularly adequately explained, and the ending is muddled, to say the least.

Nevertheless, there are bits of the story, like the father's account of his quest, or Bianca's reaction to the Borgia siblings, that genuinely come alive, and the dwarves are rather moving creatures, for all of their incomprehensibility. Overall, it's an enjoyable book, but one that takes some patience and good will to get through.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna was described to me before I started reading it as exactly like every other Umberto Eco novel. Rather, I'd say it's like a distillation of every other Umberto Eco novel, mixed into a tincture of popular Italian culture from the 30s and 40s. I found the cultural references paradoxically more opaque than those of his novels centered around the medieval and early modern periods--perhaps because with the more remote references he doesn't dare dig into the sort of minutia he exposes in TMFOQL. The story was also irritatingly underdeveloped--the nascent plot nipped in the bud by a trip to the archives (aka his childhood home) and the main character's initial semantic construction juxtaxposed against an "actual" view of th previously hidden reality, made available by an odd narrative shift that's never fully explained. The novel ends with a climactic vision of what we are presumably meant to read as the narrator's personal apocalypse, but the whole effort is rather emotionally flat, and irritatingly choked by its literary references.

As predicted, I have finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It is better than Order of the Phoenix, which I found a bit overlong, and which also gave me nightmares about federal bureaucracies for days. Indeed, it is better than any Harry Potter book except, perhaps, Azkaban.

There is less tiresome Quidditch, less totally irrational behavior from Harry, less of the dreadful Dursleys and a lot more Dumbledore, all of which suits my tastes just fine. I will avoid any spoilers in this post-- saving them for a later post-- but I basically share all or almost all of Heidi's hypotheses (spoilers there).

[50 Book Challenge]

I think I was supposed to be reading something by George R.R. Martin (and I will start it, soon!) but I accidentally started Tom Perrotta's Little Children, which I confess I found addictive, as I find all of his books (Joe College, The Wishbones, Election...). The main characters are a bunch of sad-sack parents (and a child molester) who are not exactly happy about their lives. They bumble about rather unsurely and end up more or less the same way. If it is hard to tell from this description why the book is compelling, that is fair enough, but it is.

In response to my last book post, Raffi told me that he loved my description of "promiscuous reading habits", "as if there was something vaguely immoral about riffling through books in seriatum, leaving some, stringing others along, and so on." Alas, I am indeed a promiscuous reader; but now Harry Potter 6 is here, an infatuation that I anticipate seeing through to completion.

[50 Book Challenge.]

Beauty Queen - Julia London

Beauty Queen is the abortive offspring of an ill-considered union between chick lit and the traditional romance novel. The basic premise of the story involves a recently divorced beauty queen deciding to go back to work to find meaning for her life, meeting a man, and living happily ever after. Retrograde sensibilities aside, the main issue is that the conventions of romance novels and the conventions of chick lit just don't mix, resulting in an irritatingly described series of events that I hesitate to dignify with the term story.

Warning: Arcane and potentially scary discussion of the difference between romance novels and chick lit below the fold.

At its core, chick lit's emotional heft relies on a basic identification between the reader and protagonist. The heroine of chick lit is an ordinary woman, belly fat and insecurities included, who achieves some manner of (usually provisional) success through her native wit and often a generous helping of luck. Chick lit validates emotional weight it assumes women attach to the everyday trials of life by making them the main subject of the plot. Chick lit takes the archetypical character of the common trickster, makes her female, and allows her to marry the prince.

By contrast, romance novels feature an idealized heroine who captures her prince because she deserves him. The romance novel heroine's struggles are of a more traditionally epic scale--against, for example, a scheming villain, or the limiting strictures of society. Though there is an element of identification between the reader and the heroine, the heroine is more a projection of the reader's best self, rather than a realistic portrait. Romance novels are, at their core, about escaping from the mundane, rather than elevating the mundane.

Though Beauty Queen sounds like chick lit, with its slangy language and focus on the main character's everyday insecurities, the fact that the heroine is rich enough not to need to work, beautiful enough to stop men dead in their tracks, connected enough to throw parties attended by famous country singers, and lucky enough to be able to subsist almost entirely on ice cream without gainng a pound reveals that it is, in fact, a romance novel. However, rather than coming across as a born princess, the heroine seems instead like a whiny, immature trust fund baby, complaining that all of her wealth is just such a burden. If the author wanted readers to identify with the heroine, she should have made her less socially remote, if she wanted reader to admire her heroine, she should have made her intelligent enough to recognize her natural advantages.

Moral of the story: If it's hanging out with the romance novels, but dressed up like chick lit, avoid it at all costs.

Friends and loved ones sometimes think that I have some perverse resistance to book recommendations. It is not that I don't start them, just that my promiscuous reading habits mean that I rarely finish them (just as I rarely finish any book). But this morning, per Heidi Bond's recommendation, I finished Lois Bujold's The Curse of Chalion. I agree with Raffi; she has good taste in books.

Old men, scars, curses, young love, galley slaves, marriages, black magic, demon-tumors... what more could one want?

Apparently, this person was not at all pleased:

It really chaps my hide that a woman writing in the 21st century, who, after all, is supposedly inventing a fantasy and could theoretically think up a world in which women are portrayed as something other than willowy young receptacles and subordinate producers of male heirs, wins awards for merely regurgitating the same old superannuated patriarchal crapulence that has plagued popular fiction since Clarissa and beyond

The Return of Martin Guerre - Natalie Zemon Davis

I've never been entirely able to endorse the microhistory impulse - even though the stories microhistorians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and Carlo Ginzburg produce are fascinating in their detail, and provide a much-needed corrective to the tendency of historians to see only the powerful few as individuals, and the rest of society as dumb masses of beings acted upon by social foces. The problem is that the actual writing tends to employ too much of what I think of as the "must have" spirit, in which the authors confabulate the results of their research and their unsupported, evocative speculations using pseudo-authoritative phrases such as must have done, or would have felt.

The Return of Martin Guerre shares the typical strenghths and weaknesses of the genre. On the one hand, it's a fascinating story, rendered all the more so by the historical distance that separates sixteenth century French peasants from early twenty-first century readers. In particular, the Davis' discussion of the effects of the Reformation on village relationships demonstrate the ways in which vast movements play out on a personal scale. But on the other hand, there is something unsatisfying about Davis' attempts to plumb the psyches of the main actors in the story. One is left wondering whether her assertion that Martin's wife deeply craved the acceptance of her community is an attempt to synthesize elusive hints spread across the archives, an assertion that contemporaries made as to her motivations, or a projection of the historian's own sensibilities on to the characters in her tale.

Josie and Jack: A Novel - Kelly Braffet

I am even more behind in my usual pace of reading than Will, but with even less of an excuse to offer--I'm working a nine to five job, and have plenty of free time that I could be spending reading.

I picked up Josie and Jack on the recommendation of Our Girl in Chicago and was not in any way disappointed. It's a solid entry in one of my favorite genres - children of priviledge behaving badly - and has all of the witty quips, accounts of debauchery, disturbing yet arousing sexual undertones, and highly skewed moral compasses that serve to make the genre so generally enjoyable. It's also literary enough that one need not even count it as a guilty pleasure.

If I felt like quibbling, the novel takes a rather schizophrenic view towards what might be called real-world consequences, allowing their possiblity to intrude into the somewhat dreamy world of the two main characters when it suits the plot, but allowing much more egregious acts to go, not just unpunished, but contemplated, executed, and meditated upon without even the consideration of the possiblity of consequences. Fortunately, when I finished the book, I didn't feel like dwelling on my quibbles.

I believe I have read fewer books in the first half of this year than in any year since I started keeping track. (2002, with 21 books before June 30, was a close runner-up, but there were 59 books in the second half.) Chalk this up to law school, to several hundred law review articles read that took the place of books, and so on. And chalk up the latest delay to the opaque but enjoyable Umberto Eco, whose Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana I have finally finished.

The main character is an oldish used book dealer who loses his episodic memory and can therefore remember nothing but the books he has read (and even then, only ones with no real emotional attachment to his life). He goes off to his childhood home and rummages through the attic, trying to remember things-- lost lives, loves, lyrics, and so on. A few things happen, but none can really be disclosed without spoiling the book's minimal plot. All in all the book is enjoyable, but marginally unfathomable-- more like a short story that devolves for about a hundred pages into a few stream-of-consciousness-notes before being set back on the rails. My understanding is that this is true of some of his other novels too, although truth be told I have never finished one other than The Name of the Rose (Eco's non-fiction, on the other hand, I devour).

He came to speak in D.C. recently and somebody complained that his books were very difficult. His reply: "Yes, but I write for masochists."

True enough.

Clementine in the Kitchen, by Samuel Chaberlain, (aka Phineas Beck)

A few months ago I was disappointed by the otherwise great Richard Olney's Lulu's Provencal Kitchen. Reading Samuel Chamberlain's slim but poignant volume, I figured out why - Olney had meant to write Clementine in the Kitchen (I wonder why it wasn't entitled Clementine en Cuisine for the fun alliteration, but maybe they thought people should understand the title), but had fallen short.

Both books are meant to be fond memoirs of beloved cooks. Olney wrote about Lulu, the provencal grandmother and winemaker who so enlivened the author's years in southern France. And Chamberlain also writes about a provencal woman - his family's French cook Clementine, first discovered in the Chamberlain's short time in France before World War II, and then brought back to America during that dark time. But Chamberlain writes with none of the sometimes haughty grandeur of Mr. Olney. He was simply a hungry spectator of Clementine's genius - he is not the cook. And as such, the resulting product is a cleaner, neater memoir as well asone of the most pleasant books I've read in months. My favorite passage follows:

"And for the first time in her life Clementine gazed upon a basket of blueberries. She tasted one with interest and asked for the name, which proved too much for her untutored ear. She promptly thought up the terms les petits machins bleus, which remains the official name for them in the Beck household".

Les petits machins bleu means "little blue things". I've adopted it myself.

I have been woefully lax about blogging what I've been reading lately, so forgive the monster entry.

#11 The Fourth Queen, Debbie Taylor

Fans of fictional hunchbacks and dwarves may appreciate this story about a Scottish woman kidnapped by pirates and sold into the Sultan of Morocco's harem. It's a reasonably engaging, reasonably well told, and I enjoyed reading it, but the resolution of the central dilemma of the story--will the girl choose the man who is a handsome, wealthy, powerful jerk, or the one who loves her for who she really is--feels rather unpleasantly arbitrary.

#12 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke

Lots of people have already spoken about the wondefulness of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I shall simply add my voice to the chorus. I'm torn between hoping that there will be a sequal, and fearing that more story would ruin what has already been written. The melancholy ambiguity of the ending, and the sense that there were real consequences for the magicians in exercising the power that they exercised is part of what made the book so effective.

#13 Shostokovich and Stalin, Solomon Volkov

This is, at its heart, an extremely interesting portrait of how totalitarianism affects those under its rule. However, it is fatally marred by the author's extreme hero-worship of Dmitri Shostakovich. Though the author does a an exceptional job of portraying the ambivalence with which the artistic world regarded Stalin and Stalinism, every action of Shostakovich is given a (sometimes stretched) anti-Stalin slant. Though the author seems to believe that when it came to Stalin, one was either for him or against him and Shostakovich was against him, the picture that emerges in spite of his intentions is of a more nuanced world in which one could be neither an enthusiastic party hack nor a committed anti-Stalinist.

#14 Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

I'd already become familiar, secondhand, with most of the principles underlying Steven Levitt's work before I read the book, but I still found it highly enjoyable. As an aside, Leavitt mentions a pair of twins with the improbable names of OrangeJello and LemonJello in his chapter on baby names. I, however, had already encountered reports of the pair from one of their teachers. They are apparently doing as well as one would expect children named after jiggly fruit desserts to do.

As I have made clear elsewhere, I have a weakness for the books of Arturo Perez-Reverte. So it was with no small degree of excitement that I cracked open the first volume of Captain Alatriste, newly translated into English.

None of this excitement was misplaced. Reverte clearly labors under the deep wish that he had been born as a Spanish Alexander Dumas, and he can spin tales (almost) as well as the old master. Indeed, one of the many thrills rolling off the book is the overlap between the classic Musketeers chronicles. The selfsame Duke of Buckingham makes an appearance, and the political background is constant.

Of course, there are differences, and that is the point. Spain is not France. Alatriste is an old soldier, not a brash Gascon kid. Alatriste lacks Athos's prudishness, but not his dignity. The catholic leaders do not have Richelieu's class or his cunning. Milady is 13 years old. And so on.

When I was 13, my father tried to convince me to take French rather than Spanish by emphasizing the superior literature-- high and low-- available in that tongue. Alatriste (like Rabassa) is also a bit of a comeback to that sort of Francophilia, bristling with Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Cid, Velazquez, Quevedo, and more. Michael Dirda's short-sighted review misses this angle-- this is not mere second-rate derivative Dumas, it is subversive Dumas.

Future books will be translated, and I have only one (large) complaint-- they are too expensive. These books ought to be rolling out in cheap paperbacks, to be devoured by young kids and passed easily and carelessly from hand to hand, not hardbacks scoring an exorbitant $17 each.

I, of course, will keep buying them, but I do hope that other people love them slightly less than I do, and balk.

[50 Book Challenge]

My birthday having come and gone I am now free from my self-imposed book-buying moratorium. On the way home from Indiana I polished off Gregory Rabassa's If This Be Treason, which are his relatively disjointed thoughts on the enterprise of literary translation.

Supposedly, his project is to decide whether translation can ever be non-criminal or whether, as Nabokov is said to have said, it is just a question of whether it is a felony or a misdemeanous. In reality, Rabassa devotes about 3 pages to that question, about 30 to odds and ends from his life, and the remainder of the book to little squibs on all of the translations he has done, from famous (Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad). [I will spoil the "ending" by revealing that Rabassa eventually decides that the question hasn’t been proven beyond the necessary presumption of innocence—for Article III, sec. 3 buffs, this is probably to say that while translation may be treason, we have not yet come up with the requisite two eyewitnesses to the same overt act.]

Anyway, Rabassa says that he is a better translator than he is a writer of original thought, and this is decidedly true. Which isn’t to say that his disjointed thoughts are bad, or that the book isn’t interesting, just that it reads more like a sort of meandering magazine interview with himself than an actual book. Nonetheless, 19 books down.

[50 Book Challenge]

Calvin Trillin, Feeding a Yen

Let me be very clear about this. I like Calvin Trillin. Will, I think, likes Calvin Trillin. Most people should like Calvin Trillin. He is a funny, light hearted writer of a tremendous appetite. For life, yes - but even more importantly, for food. But this review isn't positive. I'll try to explain.

Part of my displeasure with this latest effort was caused by the fact that Trillin's sparkling wit is less funny when you notice that he's told some of the same stories in two previous books - there's only a limited number of times you can hear that his daughter always took a pumpernickel bagel to chinese restaurants when she was younger, and that he's looked for the bagel in later years, and discovered that it's not a bagel at all but bread. And maybe some of Trillin's charm has leaked away with the death of his wife Alice, who one can't help having had the tiniest crush on in his earlier books. Without her character, at least as shaped by the author, the light, loving voice of moderation no longer sits at Trillin's shoulder. There is no one to reign in our ebullient host's enthusiasms.

But what finally has bothered me about Trillin's writing is his inexplicable disdain for the heart of French cooking. It was hidden in earlier books underneath his entirely justified distate for the turgid, floury, American 'continental' cooking of the 1970's. But in this book, in this decade, when Trillian rhapsodizes about a vietnamese crab with noodles and spicy sauce as some kind of ethnic valhalla, and denigrates a fried calves liver in the very next sentence, you get the feeling that he's missing the point. The French food he doesn't like is precisely the same kind of food he claims to be looking for so tirelessly - the perfect, local, specialty. The pates, and the stews, and the potatoes fried in this or sauteed in that - these aren't museum pieces but exactly the rough peasant foods that Trillin claims to love so much, just as authentic as Kansas city barbecue, or fish tacos in California. And yet, the French food is depicted as some sort of stuffy Michelin starred inconvenience - and local food anywhere but France exaggerated into glories unimagined.

Trillin tells the story of his own book best in an especially annoying chapter about chowhound.com, which is a good website, but also apparently houses a particularly loathsome form of food elitist. Describing the latter's chief flaw, Trillin admits that if a mediocre ethnic restaurant was sitting next to a really excellent bakery making fantastic blueberry muffins, some of the food adventurers he likes so much would prefer to wax rhapsodic about the former, even though the bakery was objectively better. But Trillin apparently doesn't notice that he does the same thing - banging on and on about what other authorities have noted are actually only adequate barbecue joints in the midwest, while leaving the Parisian markets to eat Chinese food in a French capital not known at all for that cuisine. It's not that Trillin is wrong to highlight the greatness of Northern New Mexican cooking, or to wander Portugal for peppers. But he's got some really odd blind spots in his taste that seem to have persisted for three decades - and they've finally put a crimp on his writing.

It's not quite clear when I read Akhil Amar's The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles-- like most books assigned for class, I read it in bits and pieces, on trains, at parties, and while procrastinating real work. Unlike most books, though, I am actually pretty sure I finished it, or at least read every part of it at some point or another, but it is a little hard to tell when. At any rate, the book is basically spun out of Amar's law review articles on a neo-textualist neo-originalist theory of the 4th, 5th, and 6th amendments.

In a nutshell: The exclusionary rule is wrong, warrants are not a prerequisite to reasonableness, juries are underused, peremptory strikes should be eliminated, there should be no criminal bench trials, the remedy for violating the speedy-trial clause should not be dismissal, defendants should have the right to issue grants of immunity, but both prosecution and defense should issue only testimonial immunity rather than transactional or use-fruits. And something is wrong with confrontation clause jurisprudence, but to be honest I have forgotten what, and will have to bone up on it before the exam Thursday. 90% of it is right, and all of it is interesting. (On what is missing from that 10%, see Michael Stokes Paulsen, Dirty Harry and The Real Constitution, 64 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1457 (1997), (reviewing Akhil Amar, The Constitution and Criminal Procedure: First Principles (1997)).

I spent yet another Greyhound bus ride reading another Currie book, this time volume three of The Constitution in Congress: Democrats and Whigs, which the Interlibrary Loan office found for me last week. (Volumes 1 and 2 were books five and fifteen respectively). This time there was too much Constitutional deliberation for Currie to cover the period from 1829-1861 in a single book, so the economic stuff and miscellany was kept in this book, while the slavery skirmishes were split off into Descent into the Malestrom, which will come out later this year (but when?). That means this book has less of a consistent theme than some of the previous books, but it is still littered with fascinating characters. In addition to Clay, Webster, and Calhoun, who are the main heroes of the story, (Currie disapproves of every president in this time period except for James Polk) we hear from such characters as Gulian Verplanck, a classicist, theologian, and lawyer who fought hard against governmental Thanksgiving proclamations and tariffs before retiring to New York to produce a complete edition of Shakespeare's works and look after impoverished immigrants, as well as North Carolina's George Badger, who defended the constitutionality of the Wheeling Bridge statute without impugning judicial review. The Supreme Court apparently refused Badger's nomination to the Supreme court in 1853 because he thought (contra Dred Scott) that Congress could ban slavery in the territories. Adds Currie, "My praise here and elsewhere for the admirable Badger has nothing to do with the fact that I spent several happy formative years living in North Carolina."

At any rate, there is much more, but at this point it is hard to know where to begin or end. Long live David Currie. Or, as he ends the book: "Let us not tarry here. There is another story to be told, and I am eager to tell it. See you in volume four!"

When my friend loaned me her copy of Ruth Reichl's Garlic and Sapphires yesterday she warned me I would have it finished before the night was through. I didn't start it until about midnight, but sure enough, that just meant it was a long time before I finally went to sleep.

I'm the one who pushed co-blogger Amy toward Comfort Me With Apples, Reichl's second book. This one is Reichl's third, and it's the story of her tenure as head restaurant reviewer for the New York Times. Because all of the restaurants had her picture posted, she spent nearly all of her visits in disguise, especially after she went to some fabulous places the first few times and discovered the vast gaps in the treatment of V.I.P. and hoi polloi.

Anyway, the book is great, although much to my surprise Comfort Me With Apples is a smidgen better; Sapphires is a little shorter on personal drama and a little longer on food stories. Still, it did keep me up until 3 in the morning. . . . Most fascinatingly, Reichl didn't really seem to enjoy her job very much.

[50 Book Challenge]

The last time I read a David Currie book on the Greyhound bus I got a strange twitch in my eye that lasted almost a week. Not so this time, luckily. In any case, I have just finished the second volume of The Constitution in Congress: The Jeffersonians.

I liked this one more than the first volume (Federalists), to my surprise, because the heroes were a bit more flawed, and clay-footed .

Reading about President Washington's deliberation over every constitutional question (since he rightly recognized that his every step would become constitutional precedent) was heartening, but also exhausting. What hope for later, lesser commaders-in-chief with twenty times as many issues on their daily schedule and 200 years of presidential precedent to comb through?

So while Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Quincy Adams (not to mention the unforgettable and forgettable inhabitants of Congress) frequently baffle this modern reader, it was good to see that serious popular deliberation over constitutional issues once worked, and to see the venerable pedigree of so many modern constitutional puzzles (the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, for example).

A professor who saw me reading this last week remarked that Professor Currie is "doing God's work!" For now, my only complaint is that the next two volumes of The Constitution in Congress (Democrats and Whigs & Descent into the Maelstrom), both scheduled for 2005 publication, do not yet seem to be in Yale's library.

[50 Book Challenge]

Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue

Sometimes Amazon's "Explore Similar Items" feature can be wonderful, but other times, it just goes so very, very wrong. It was a reasonable assumption, I suppose, that if I enjoyed reading about a nineteenth century English prostitute in The Crimson Petal and the White, I'd also enjoy reading about an eighteenth century English prostitute. Unfortunately, the seriously unlikeable protagonist, paper-thin plot, and workmanlike prose make Slammerkin a serious disappointment. Readers know from the beginning that Mary will meet her end on the gallows--by about two thirds of the way through, I was so tired of her whiny, self-destructive behavior I couldn't wait for her to get there.

The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl

Though The Dante Club got off to a rather slow and scattered start, it managed to pull inself together enough to become a satisfying literary thriller. The basic premise of the story is that while Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is working on the first American translation of Dante, assisted by other members of the Boston literary elite, Boston is experiencing a rash of highly gruesome murders, which only the translators recognize as inspired by Dante's Inferno. Meanwhile, the ultra-Conservative heads of Harvard University are actively opposing the translation of Dante, who they see as too foreign and Catholic, leaving the poets to believe that their only alternative is to undertake the investigation of the murders themselves, lest news of their connection to Dante be used to scuttle their translation entirely.

Though most of the plot lines eventually come together at the climax, the build-up often comes across as jumpy and disjointed. It takes more than eighty pages to get to the connection between the poets and the murderers, three quarters of the book to understand where the conflict with Harvard fits in, and nearly to the end to understand why it matters that all of this is taking place just after the end of the Civil War.

As for Dante, while the appropriate passages are quoted reverently, his poetry or the appreciation thereof never plays a very central role in the story. So while the result was certainly satisfying for a historical fiction/murder mystery/Dante lover, I felt more like the subject of a Pavalovian experiment who had successfully gotten all of her food pellets, than a reader moved or enlightened by a literary experience.

There are very few things in this world that make me regret going to law school rather than doing something else. Not quantum game theory, not the poetry of Brad Leithauser, not theories of self-translation, not even, quite, reading Czeslaw Milosz. However, reading stuff by Steven Levitt, namely his forthcoming co-written book Freakonomics still reminds me of how much closer and satisfying certain economic truths can be than certain legal ones.

[A moment for full disclosure: I have a copy of this book because the publishers asked me to review it in this space-- this didn't influence my opinion of the book, though. If I had hated it, I would be saying so here. I didn't even think to demand a kickback (other than a copy of the book), although the blog will receive a tiny credit on Amazon if you buy it at the link below. Also, I took Levitt's signature course on the Economics of Crime in the Spring of 2002; I received an A-, because I flubbed one final exam question, about how one might use carrots rather than sticks to control crime. I made the dimwitted suggestion that we could offer $10,000 to every man who makes it past the age of 25 without commiting a major crime. In retrospect, I should have suggested the Brazilian bounty-hunting model for corrupt cops, where police officers who rat out other corrupt officers receive huge sums of money, enough to compensate for the "you'll never work again in this town" effect.]

Anyway, this brings us to Freakonomics, co-written by Levitt and one Stephen Dubner (the author of his NYT profile from a few months back). As Stuart Buck points out, the book is written in Dubner's voice rather than Levitt's, but this isn't particularly bothersome.

The only complaint I do have against the book is that it is a little basic-- a few too many pages spent at the beginning rehashing the notion of deterrence and other hobbyhorses, and for people who have already read most of Levitt's work, there will be fewer surprises, since much of the book rehashes his research rather than describing the sordid secrets of his childhood upbringing. Well, I guess I also don't like the book's title, which is memorable but silly.

So, that said, what's good about the book? Everything else. Levitt's research (how to catch cheating high school teachers, how to catch cheating sumo wrestlers, whether the death penalty or legalized abortion did more to reduce crime in the '90s, why drug dealers are poor) is all interesting and all persuasive, and all entertaining. If more economists were like Steven Levitt (alas, most aren't) I probably would have tried to be one too.

The end of the book also goes into Levitt's work with up-and-coming economist Ronald Fryer (also recently profiled by Dubner in the Times), which includes the causes and consequences of black names. I wonder if there will be another book soon.

So anyway, this book belongs in the category of David Friedman's Hidden Order and Steven Landsburg's Fair Play-- easy to read but fascinating books on microeconomics for laymen-- but it is much better than either one, because (with all due respect to Landsburg and Friedman) Levitt is a much better economist.

[N.B. For those who are searching for more Levitt, he (along with Gary Becker, Crescat guest-blogger Doug Lichtman, and several others) has an amicus brief (PDF) in the upcoming Grokster case. Oh, and this is also my 15th book for the 50 Book Challenge.]

Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude and falling in love with it, I have really, really tried to feel similarly amorous towards Marquez's other works. However, nothing has quite grabbed me. Of Love and Other Demons is certainly a good book, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't had such high expectations for it.

Of Love and Other Demons is a small book about Sierva Maria, a girl who is variously believed to be a saint, rabid, and possessed by a demon. She is sent to a convent to be exorcised, but instead becomes the obsessive love interest of the priest sent to perform her exorcism. However, despite being the ostensible focus of the story, Sierva Maria never becomes a real character--rather Marquez seems to have created her as something of a human ink blot that the various adults around her only comprehend in light of their own prejudices. Disappointingly, the reader never gains any insight into her state of mind, and as a result, Delaura's passion for her comes off as rather incomprehensible and unaffecting. Perhaps some of the book's flatness stems as well from Edith Grossman's translation--that the prose doesn't seem to zing in quite the fashion of One Hundred Years of Solitude could say more about her skills relative to Gregory Rabassa than about the relative merits of the two books as Marquez wrote them.

Donna Tartt's The Little Friend and John Irving's The Cider House Rules are twins in many respects. Both are gripping but not-entirely-trashy paperbacks, each one kept me engrossed for most of a transatlantic flight, both deal with death and community in a highly geographic focus in two regions (New England, the South) that I'm not much familiar with. And both have incredibly unsatisfying endings.

I liked both, but in the end, I preferred Cider House, not because I liked the ending (I didn't! The shy, shuffly hero should win the enchanting if vapid blonde a little more often. C.f. The Secret History), but because it at least had one. Among my lowbrow biases is this: Unless a sequel is to be reasonably expected, I would like my characters' lives tidied up, please. It is nice to follow through until they actually die, but I am willing to make certain allowances. I will not give away the plot of the Little Friend except to say this-- If, most of the way through the book you develop questions about what is going on, the rest of the book will not answer any of them.

[50 Book Challenge]

The Paid Companion
Amanda Quick

I have consumed an embarassing number of romance novels, and I would say a good third of them feature a certain tired plot cliche in which the plucky heroine, unwittingly thrown into the midst of dangerous circumstances, sets out in an attempt to singlehandedly solve the mystery/capture the criminal/rescue the kidnapped child or whatever, in an attempt to prove her mettle to the overprotective hero. She invariably ends up in some sort of mortal peril, and has to be rescued by said hero, who only realizes how much he loves her only after seeing her in danger.

It's an irritating cliche, but The Paid Companion, in which the hero and heroine cordially cooperate to catch a murderer and then get married, demonstrates why it should perhaps remain a cliche. Conflict and rivalry certainly isn't my ideal in a relationship, but it's a whole lot more fun to read than four hundred pages of uninterrupted mutual admiration.

And in light of this, along with this and this perhaps people will be less willing to argue that Crescat Sententia is hopelessly pretentious?

I actually read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities a few weeks ago after picking up a cheap copy in the Strand, but it was not until today that I remembered to chase down the last few pages. It really is a good book, and Jacobs's fame is well-deserved.

To be sure, much of the book is dated-- not all of the neighborhoods that Jacobs complained about when she wroter her book are still so vile today-- and some of her biggest foes in the book are now straw men. Still, one can never have too many arguments about the folly of the public housing project, the perils of too much city-planning, the need for urban traffic control, etc. Anyway, if the readings in Professor Ellickson's class are any guide, land use has advanced a lot since Jacobs wrote her book, but I think that would make her happy.

[50 Book Challenge]

I saw The Pedant in the Kitchen by Julian Barnes in the bookstore during my ill-fated tenure in England, and read the first few pages in the bookstore before moving on to other works. (I spent many evenings reading the Borders' overpriced stock.) It finally occurred to me to see if Yale had a copy, and lo, they did. The book is basically a collection of Barnes's cooking columns, which focus on his own pet neuroses-- Barnes can't stand imprecise recipes (a handful? whose hand?) and believes that pictures in cookbooks are misleading but are mostly a showcase for his wit. This is good.

However, Barnes's taste in food is positively disturbing. He stuffs salmon with currants, almonds, ginger, and other flotsam; he makes far too much pudding; he also attempts to create "hare in chocolate sauce" although a chemical accident thankfully stops him. It is good to be reminded how much I don't miss English food. (One exception, the Wednesday/Saturday cheesemonger who hung out in the Cambridge market and had the most delicious young goat cheese buttons...)


[50 Book Challenge]

I was tempted not to blog this one-- a trashy, meaningless, one-off fling I managed without leaving the bookstore-- but apparently the 50 Book Challenge operates under a rule of full-disclosure. That said, I have little else to say about Chloe Does Yale, the not-very-long, not-very-interesting, not-very-fictional tale of a Yale sex columnist, written by ex-Yale sex columnist Natalie Krinsky. If one had taken the surplus 200 pages from Jenna Jameson's memoir and padded them with 40 pages of cursory exposition of Yale landmarks, you would have this book.

[50 Book Challenge]

How to Make Love like a Porn Star - Jenna Jameson

I picked this book up (surprise, surprise) purely for the purient appeal. Unfortunately, it was about two hundred pages too long, the story was predicable, the main character not that attractive and deeply uninteresting, and the good bits few and far between.

Kind of like a pornographic film.

Not, of course, that I would have any firsthand experience with those sorts of things (if you're reading this, Mom). But I've heard stuff. Around. About those sorts of things.

Some time ago, during our then-regular breakfasts at Salonica, Jim Leitzel mentioned that he was enthusiastically reading Calvin Trillin's Tepper Isn't Going Out. When I questioned him further about it, he said that he liked it a lot, but seemed reluctant to recommend it. I forgot about it entirely. Yesterday, while browsing used books, I noticed something on the top shelf by Calvin Trillin, though I couldn't see what it was-- Lo and behold, Tepper Isn't Going Out, which I bought "As is" (The book jacket was mangled, but the tome itself was in fine condition.)

Tepper is about a man, Murray Tepper, who lives in New York and likes to park his car in attractive parking spaces (meter fully paid) and read the paper. Oer time he attracts the ire of many Manhattan drivers, a cult following, and the enmity of a Giuliani-parody mayor. The book is the story of how people react to his eccentricity.

I loved it, though it is so difficult to explain why that I now understand Leitzel's reluctance to actively recommend it to others. I suppose it must suffice to say that the book is about the dvision between those who figure that if it's a legal spot then there's no need for him to explain himself to anybody, and those who are convinced that any practice they do not understand, however private, must be sinister.

[50 Book Challenge]

Comfort Me with Apples - Ruth Reichl

If I could have any job in the world, professional food critic would be pretty near the top of the list--just slightly below prima ballerina for American Ballet Theater--and reading Ruth Reichl's memoir only increased the aura of glamour that I'd always associated with the job. What, after all, could be better than living the life of a gourmand on somebody else's dime, and then writing about it?

Though Reichl doesn't just talk about the delicious meals she eats, but also describes the disintegration of her first marriage, and the heartbreak she goes through when the birth mother of her adopted daughter decides she wants the baby back, her general attitude seems to be one of celebration of her ability to succeed at what seems like her dream career as well.

The food, of course, figures prominently, as she describes meals ranging from street food in Bangkok to foie gras and truffles from the Tour d'Argent--descriptions that generally provide a practical dissection of what exactly made a dish successful, rather than merely flying off into poetic but useless metaphors. Finding words to explain what makes a good dish good is hard, and success at it is the reason food critics get paid.

But most reassuringly, Reichl didn't get her first job writing about food until she was nearly thirty. While I may have missed the boat already as a prima ballerina, that still leaves me plenty of time to make it as a food critic.

An Inconvenient Wife - Megan Chance
The Birth of Venus - Sarah Dunant

I decided to blog about these books together because they are both examples of the well-worn "young woman in a patriarchal society finds fufilment through adultery and painting" storyline (the fact that I find that plotline well worn says something not entirely complimentary about my reading habits). The first tells the story of a wealthy member of ninteenth century New York society diagnosed as suffering from "uterine monomania," (or what we would call boredom, sexual frustration, and alcohol abuse) who really wants to leave her high-society life behind and paint. Since she is forbidden by her husband to do this, she instead falls in love with her doctor and concocts a plot with him to escape from her husband's controlling clutches. The plot is overblown, the characters are unlikable, but it's a bit of a diverting read, following the heroine as she runs afoul of nineteenth century sexual politics.

The second book tells the story of a young woman living in fifteenth-century Florence, who really wants to leave behind the life of a successful merchant's daughter in order to paint. However, when a French invasion threatens, she is told she must either marry or be sent to a convent, and she decides to marry an older man who seems sympathetic to her love of art and learning. However, it transpires that he is actually carrying on a torrid affair with her brother. In revenge, she embarks upon her own awkward, abortive affair with the young painter who is decorating her family's chapel. Unlike the first book, there is actually a modicum of interesting history, as the heroine reacts to the rise and fall of the religiously fanatical regime of Savonorola.

At their heart, both books consist essentially of asking what it would be like for a woman with essentially contemporary sensibilities to be trapped in a past that significantly restricts the opportunities and experiences available to women. It's a fantasy exercise more than a literary one--an opportunity to put oneself in the place of the heroine, wearing her fantastic clothes, enjoying her romantic lover, and fighting her valiant battle against female oppression--and I'm a sucker for these sorts of books,

But what irks me is that both authors had to draw the battle lines so comfortably, with nary a bit of complexity. The betrayed husbands are set up to have earned their betrayal, the social conventions to be purposeless boundaries. As a result, reading both books felt, in the end, about as pleasant as being asked "Are you for increased environmental protection, or do you think big corporations should be allowed to dump poisonous chemicals into the drinking water of preschool children?"

If Will feels somewhat guilty to be behind Waddling Thunder in the book challenge, I feel very guilty to be behind them both while not even in law school, especially since the second book I've read, the first volume of Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia trilogy, is so short.

Now, I like Stoppard (almost) as much as the next guy, I was disappointed by Voyage. The classic Stoppardian elements were all there--the clever repartee, the witty speeches with philosophical undertones, the games played with time and narrative--but they never seemed to come together to form a coherent whole. The big speeches, in particular, seemed stuck into the story like songs into a musical.

Perhaps it was because the work is the first play of the trilogy, but there just seemed to be too much stuff stuck in the story, with none of it really going anywhere. Neither character nor plot seemed to have been given much space to develop. Hopefully, a satisfying story will develop over the course of the next two plays.

Book #16: Camembert: A National Myth, by Pierre Boisard

Between the fact that this book was originally written in French, and that the author acknowledges the French ministry of Culture, one can imagine that American cheese makers come in for a bit of a slating in this friendly history of the great cheese. And they do - Boisard's depiction of the sophisticated American capitalists hoodwinking artisanal French cheese producers into teaching them their secrets - on the pretense of protecting their traditions- is really pretty funny. And I couldn't help chuckling at the (understandable) French reaction when American cheese makers offered to replace the the bombed statue of Camembert's patron saint Marie Harel with a figure inscribed "This statue was the gift of the Borden Ohio Camembert Factory". As if there could be a Camembert factory in Ohio - I mean, really!

But the overwhelming sense from this book isn't the failure of American cheese making, but the apparently troublesome state of the French industry. As Boisard points out, both France and Europe as a whole have started to fall prey to the pasteurization trend - the book reports that 90% of the cheese made in France is now treated. And even if you think you're buying the real article, Boisard points out , worryingly, that not all raw milk Camembert is made equal. Traditional camembert is made by spooning the curds of local milk into molds by hand. The hand ladling ensures that the curd is never cut, distinguishing Camembert from other cheeses (such as Pont L'Eveque) where this doesn't matter. As for the provenance of the milk, ideally you should be able to tell if you're eating a Camembert of Isigny or one of Auge. As the former head of a dairy mill told the author,

"Save for its origin, what is traditional about a Camembert whose milk comes from Dutch Holstein cows fed on imported cattle cakes and corn silage . . . and whose broken curd is ladle-molded by robots?".

Set in the context of our problems here in the US when it comes to cheese, a robot ladle doesn't seem so bad. But if France falters, where can we turn? I'm really not sure.

I feel somewhat guilty that co-blogger Waddling Thunder is reading books at twice the rate I am while also attending a law school with grades. At any rate, I just finished William Rehnquist's The Supreme Court, which is an interesting read, but it is really time for me to stop reading these sorts of Supreme Court memoirs. After Closed Chambers, Order and Law, and Serving Justice, and now this I am beginning to worry that my parents will come put me into rehab to defray my Supreme Court addiction.

The most interesting thing was Chief Justice Rehnquist's recurring discussion of the length-of-service of various long-serving Justices. One suspects that the Chief Justice would like to be able to be the longest-serving Justice of all time, but that will require him to stay on the bench a few more years yet.

Book #13: France in Crisis, by Timothy B. Smith
N.b. - this post is very long, but I'm putting it here as well as on Waddling Thunder because I think it of more general interest.

Right at the end of her profile in the New York Times, which I discuss here, author of French Women Don't Get Fat Mireille Guiliano dropped the following bombshell - it's an astonishing point, given her obvious love for France:

"I could never have done all this in France', she said. 'France is a class society. They will kill you if you want to be an entrepreneur here. I would get an ulcer in three weeks".

As much as I too love France, Guiliano's right. France is a fanatically anti-entrepreneur society, weighing down all efforts to make money from anywhere but the government with multitudinous layers of appalling regulation and tax, as I'll note below. In the course of talking about this issue with my French entrepreneur uncles, I've decided (in a mock-psychological way) that this horrible bias against effort is probably a result of early modern derogation - the practice of actually demoting nobility if they engaged in any business but hereditary landholding. French revolution or not, that kind of long standing taboo must have grafted itself onto the national psyche somewhat. Otherwise, I've got no explanation.

In any case, the author of France in Crisis, Timothy B. Smith, knows all this just as well as I do. But what's interesting about the book is that Smith approaches French economic failure not from the libertarian perspective, but from that of an economically aware socialist. His problems with French policies aren't, in other words, that they're overly redistributionist - rather, Smith is convinced that France somehow combines the worst of regressivity with the kind of anti-business regulation that most hurts the poor and unemployed in the search for jobs and worthy stability.

From my (admitedly second-hand) experiences with French economic policy, I would say that France suffers from three major problems. 1) the costs of hiring employees are far too high. 2) even though all taxation is too high, payroll taxes are particularly so 3) far too many people work and want to work for the government. Smith discusses all three of these issues, and provides facts which I wouldn't have been able to muster alone.

1) The one overpowering impression I had from spending time with my uncles is that hiring an employee was almost impossible. It was expensive, they wouldn't work hard, and you couldn't get rid of them. Unsurprisingly, they made sure to hire as few as humanly possible, and consequently were always understaffed.

Smith's book quantifies those intuitions. Hiring an employee is expensive not only because the French SMIC (minimum wage) is relatively high, but because it's paid to a lot of workers (an astonishing 11% of the workforce) and has risen far faster than the minimum wage of other countries - the French not only raise the wage each year by 1 to 4% regardless of economic growth (p. 109), but administered "additional 'coups de pouce'" (gratuitous additions to the SMIC) every second year or so throughout the 1980's and 1990s . . . and invariably during election years". (p. 109). Out-of-control wage growth in the face of economic stagnation is uncontroversially harmful - as economists estimated in the late 1990s, even a 1% increase in the value of the SMIC killed 4,000 to 20,000 jobs. SMIC has been piling jobs onto the pire of ideological blindness for the past twenty years, and the French government shows no signs of stopping it.

But that's not all. Sure, SMIC is too high. But the other costs associated with hiring someone are also far too high. The French Code du Travail, the labor law, is "thousands of pages long" (p. 115) , and is completely inflexible - I remember my family's efforts to fire an employee who had physically assaulted his manager taking several months - I can't imagine how long firing someone for economic reasons might take. As I note below, huge additional sums have to be added to SMIC in employer side payroll taxes. Furthermore, the workers won't work after you pay them - instead, they spend only 35 hours in the office or shop floor, take 5 weeks of vacation, and disappear for years after pregnancies with rights to return at any moment. I've heard leftists here in America defend the 35 hour work week, noting that 5 hours less in the office hurts no one. But it does, and obviously so - when my uncles owned a small factory, what the 35 hour week meant was a half day on Friday. Since the factory required a full morning to clean for work (food production facilities, for obvious reasons, have to be clean), the employees would show up, clean the place, and then leave for the weekend. Presto - one fewer day of production and profits! And, incidentally, fewer jobs and growth.

2) If the appalling restrictions above actually helped employees, weaker economic growth might (in a not very convincing world) be a good choice to make in preference to Anglo-America "barbarism". As Smith points out in his argument that France remains a dramatically unequal society, however, the workers don't really end up benefiting from the wages they get - the French state gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Particularly damaging are French payroll taxes, which are extraordinarily high and seem almost designed to be unfair. As the book notes, and I know from experience, the typical SMIC worker earning 10,000 Francs never sees 20.6% of his salary (p. 136), which is funnelled away to provide for a social security system that dramatically advantages the well to do over everyone else. This payroll taxation, as of 1997, was 40.6% of (relatively much higher than any normal country) French tax revenue, meaning that France relies heavily on taxing its low income inhabitants for cash. (p. 137). Of course, the French worker still faces income, property, automobile and residential taxes on top of that, and if he dares buy anything from the market, has to pay another 19.6% in Value Added Tax (Sales Tax). We won't even get into what happens if he's unfortunate enough to have to drive. The result is that French income inequality is almost the same as that in America, but without the salutory effect of high American wages. From the perspective of the author's Canadian leftism, French economic policy is the worst parts of America and Sweden rolled into one, with careful efforts made to exclude anything salutory from either alternative.

3) The French civil service is bloated beyond all conceivable belief for someone in the United States. The sheer figures are enough to stagger the imagination - a full 25% of the French workforce works for the state. (p. 77) But even worse, these public parasites are treated like kings, as if they were producing wealth rather than absorbing it - to take only one example,

"SNCF (the train monopoly) workers can stay in ski chalets in the Alps owned by the company's labor council for about one fifth the cost of a normal vacation, plus their trip via rail is free (including the fares of relatives an children). SNCF employees are entitled to eighteen free trips within Europe per year", while SNCF's annual debt, "paid by taxpayers, is equivalent to 1% of GNP". (p. 24)

One might, if one was insane, turn a blind eye to this mess if these people were actually even remotely efficient. But both the people and the system are broken. Unsurprisingly, state employees who literally can't be fired (p. 24) won't work hard. Not only is "the absentee rate in the public sector twice as high as the private sector" (p. 24), but French state employees go on strikes at almost random to protect their privileges - anyone trying to travel in France during one of its periodic transportation shut downs knows how much fun that is. But even worse, the system is designed to be inefficient - as Smith notes (and this is a fabled example of French inefficiency), "French taxes [uniquely] are assessed by one agency and collected by another", resulting in tax collection costs that are "six times higher as a percentage of GDP than in either Sweden or the United States". (p.25) When the government proposed reform in the late 1990's, the public employees hit the streets in a major strike and torpedoed the proposal. Yes, that's right - a proposal to have the same people tax and collect tax was beaten by bureaucrats on strike.

Combined with the fact that public sector wages are unaccountably 20 to 30% higher than in the private sector, these privileges and opportunities for shirking necessarily attract a wide swathe of French youth eager to sink into the comfortable recesses of bureaucratic indolence. As Smith quotes one (avowedly socialist - I'm excluding some bizarre natterings about the proletariat) French social critic,

"We no longer look to work as our key source of income, but rather we seek a 'statut remunerateur' which will protect against the risk of being without a regular income. Securing a job in the post office and marrying a teacher with [access to a municipally] subsidized apartment, has become an individualistic, winning strategy in the long short term, but in the long run it constitutes a losing formula for society". (p. 134)

This effect has particularly negative consequences for France's elite. Instead of fanning out among the liberal professions and (more importantly) business, the best France has to offer are shuffled through its sclerotic grand ecoles. These Napoleonic academies, originally designed to produce the officer-bureaucrats of the Emperor's new France, are almost exclusively designed to produce bureacrats. Indeed, the most prestigous of all, the Ecole National D'Administration (ENA) explicitly purports to do nothing but. Imagine, as I've said to friends, if America's most prestigous university were the National University of Bureacracy! But even worse than the mere idea of channeling smart people towards the government is the fact that the grands ecoles aren't even egalitarian, as originally envisioned - in the period from 1987-1996, "only 5.5% of the students of ENA hailed from working class backgrounds". (p. 140). For a society that purports to value "solidarity", that's a pretty distressing statistic.

Ultimately, of course, I disagree with Smith. I think France should forget its own model, forget the Swedish model, and destroy the social, tax, and benefit systems in favor of relatively liberal capitalism. But the positive part of having Smith write this book and not me is that Smith can't be accused of being a rightist. He wants more spending, more socialism, and more equality. The only problem is that France doesn't provide what he wants, and this book points that out with startling clarity.

This book hasn't yet been published, and so it is unclear whether a pile of unbound and printed pages really counts for the 50 Book Challenge, but I think that it does. What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.
The book follows in the mold of What Brown v. Board of Education Should Have Said, but with a striking difference: Brown is so well-accepted that much of the decisions were a game of justifying various theories of Constitutional interpretation by showing off how they can lead to the right result in Brown. In Roe, it goes the other way around (for the most part)-- theories are trotted out to protect Roe instead of Roe used to protect the theories. [The biggest exception were the opinions that use Roe to announce the then-novel doctrine that classifications on the basis of gender met strict scrutiny.] Another opinion had a very fascinating exploration of the sincerity of the belief that abortion is murder, and once the book is out I will blog about it further.

[50 Book Challenge]

Despite a late start brought on by a rather tumultous first month of the year (you try changing jobs and moving in the same month and see how much time it leaves you to read), I still intend to complete the 50 Book Challenge.

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte is a reasonably satisfying whodunnit, but still a disappointing novel overall. Perez-Reverte specializes in the sort of clever, literary thrillers that I can never resist - the sort that make the reader feel smart for picking up on the buried literary allusions - and considering that this one revolved around chess and art restoration, it should have been highly enjoyable.

Instead, the book was marred by the presence of a number of unpleasant literary off notes. The attempts at postmodern self-referentialism, and considerations of the role of the audience in the creation of a work dressed theselves up as sophisticated discource, but came across as jarringly simplistic and out of place. Meanwhile, the extensive Freudian analysis of the game of chess rolled on interminably without a hint of irony. That the bishop's long, diagonal moves imply homosexuality would have been amusing, if the parody had not been unintentional.

Both of the above faults were exacerbated by the way in which they both appeared in attempts to beef up the intellectual credentials of the main character's love interest. Having made an unpreposessing entrance into the novel, the author spent the rest of the work attempting to demonstrate that no, really, this faded, socially inept genius chess player did constitute a worthy companion to the beautiful, worldly genius art restorer. The author would have done much better to provide information about what the art restorer did find attractive about the chess player, rather than trying to turn him into something he didn't seem to be.

Finally, the surprise denoument started off daring, but resolved itself too neatly. Instead of forcing the characters to confront a real moral dilemma, the author provided an all-to-convenient fatal disease to tie up the loose ends. Fans of the clever literary thriller are better off sticking to The Club Dumas.

I just finished Serving Justice, by now-Judge Harvie Wilkinson. The book is a short autobiography of his time clerking for Justice Powell, and it is compelling in its own modest way. It doesn't make any grand claims or arguments, but is full of lots of little vignettes and curiously time-bound claims about the hot cases of the time (San Antonio v. Rodriguez, Roe v. Wade, &c.), most remarkable for Wilkinson's humility and reverence for the Supreme Court as an institution.

Unfortunately, the book did not shed any light on my burning query-- why did Judge Wilkinson leave teaching at the University of Virginia to be the editorial page editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot?

[50 Book Challenge]

I just finished reading Professor David Currie's The Constitution in Congress: The Federalist Period. The book covers a span of twelve years of Congressional deliberations-- almost entirely in the House, because the records of the Senate Proceedings in that time are mostly closed. You might not think that a book with only 300 pages and over 2100 footnotes (many of them quite substantive) would be such a fascinating read, but is. I cannot tell whether it is because the First through Sixth Congresses were such a hoot or because Currie is so great at rendering them.

One thing that is great about Currie's touch is his light hand with respect to editorializing. There are a few times he breaks into the text to opine on the matters at hand (when praising George Washington, condemning the Alien and Sedition Acts and the 1800 Election shenanigans in Congress, and making a mixed defense of sovereign immunity) but for the most part he limits himself to the occasional, but piercing, adverb or adjective. (E.g., An article by Amar is "creative", another article is "implausible", many of Madison's recommendations are "sensible" and Madison himself is "ubiquitous", although the following Madison suggestion is "daffy":)

Madison, in retirement in Virginia, sensibly suggested that Adams call a special session of the new (Republican) House to make the choice if the old House did not, adding more grotesquely that if he failed to do so Jefferson and Burr should summon Congress by "joint proclamation," since "the prerogative of convening the Legislature must reside in one or other of them." (FN)

FN: If as a constitutional matter this daffy expedient was "not strictly regular," he added, it was more nearly so than any alternative that had been proposed. Cf W.S. Gilbert, The Gondoliers, Act I.

I am a little behind Pejman and the august personages at Crooked Timber in picking up Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, but that is because Yale's copy has been bouncing from person to person for a maximum of two weeks each, and it only arrived in my hands this week. It is truly a delightful book. I do not think I have read a better one since ... a long while. Perhaps Of Love and Other Demons.

I am not quite sure why I find myself so drawn to a secretive, peevish, lying, careless, selfish magician who believes in co-opting the organs of government to suppress his enemies, and using force and thievery to destroy speech that he disagrees with, but I do very much adore Mr. Norrell; perhaps it is the books. Strange is a little flashy and helter-skelter for my tastes, but he turned out all right.

Anyway, the urge to quote, and quote until nothing is left is strong (oh, the footnotes!) but what good would a mere fragment do?

[50 Book Challenge]

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Our Girl in Chicago asks (rhetorically, I think):

This is a fantasy on a fairly obvious level: who, after all, reads 800-page novels in a week? Even if they don't have to go to school and keep their overgrown-adolescent mother perpetually entertained?

Charles Fried makes me so happy. I think I first started paying real attention to him when I read a U Chi L Rev article by him, shortly before Orin Kerr pointed out a speech at Harvard, which directed me to his newest book, Saying What The Law Is. Coursing through the Yale library I came across his Order and Law: Arguing the Reagan Revolution which I read on the way to and from New York this weekend (reviews of MoMA and Turandot are coming).

I am, of course, a Supreme Court geek, and I also have an affection for autobiography much more than straight biography, so it's no surprise that the book (an account of Fried's time as Solicitor General) appealled. Further, Fried writes with a fascinating combination of arrogance and humility-- the book was written when it looked like both affirmative action and Roe were doomed, so it is fun to cast Fried's analysis in light of Adarand, Grutter, Gratz, Casey, and Stenberg.

Still, Fried is less defnsive and more mixed in his analysis in himself and some of his choices than I would have expected-- books like this are the reason I read autobiographies.

2 Other bonuses for this book: 1, Fried deals extensively with the question of what kind of allegiance a Solicitor General owes to the Attorney General and the President, a topic I have gone back and forth with my girlfriend over. 2, The book is a welcome counterpoint to some of the bizarre savagery in Lincoln Caplan's The Tenth Justice.

It's sort of unfortunate I'm the first person in 12 years (and the 4th person ever) to have checked this book out from Yale.

[50 Book challenge]

UPDATE: Rereading my previous post about Fried's speech I did notice one odd thing. In the speech, Fried said he admired Justices Marshall, Jackson, Harlan (2), and Black. But in Order and Law he devotes quite a bit of space to setting Harlan and Black against one another, and explaining why Harlan's sensitive, tradition-based jurisprudence is so superior to Black's "anti-intellectual" version. Either I missed something, or his mind has changed.

Amber Taylor looks to draft other bloggers to participate in something called the 50 Book Challenge-- the challenge being to read 50 books this year and blog about them.

1: Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree: A book about, appropriately enough, listing the books he has read and writing about them. I loved High Fidelity, How to be Good, About a Boy and even Fever Pitch, but when Hornby donates his writing profits to charity, his books tend to be overpriced and substandard. I thought it would be hard for a wit like him to write a boring book about being pretentious about books, but he managed it. Still, during a five-hour Philadelphia layover my usual intolerance for bad books relaxes.

2: Iain Pears's The Titian Committee: I don't know why Iain Pears spends his time writing weird little plot-driven books about a made-up squad of Italian art police (do these books really sell? and to whom?), but I am glad that he does, because they are pleasantly distracting, and full of fun details about Italy. His characters are more than a little cookie-cutter, but the paintings are the real characters.