What Are We Reading?

The main character is a world famous game-player who is lured away from his home to play a game so complicated that a multi-planet empire has been constructed around it. Political intrigue, personal intrigue, principal-agent problems, and other forms of game theory ensue, though we never learn the details of this or any game. The book also serves as an introduction to Banks's Culture series, a set of science fiction books set in a post-scarcity society where humans live satisfied but boring lives while artificial intelligence handles the strategic planning. This novel is so captivating that it helped break me out of a several month period of reader's block.

I am currently reading David Blight's new biography of Frederick Douglass. I haven't finished it yet, but it's clear to me that this is a major book and beautifully done. In a way we know a lot about Douglass, since he wrote so much about his own life. But we have lacked an independent and comprehensive vantage point. Blight deftly embeds Douglass in the history of slavery, the Abolition movement, and Reconstruction, makes evident his immense oratorical skill and his charismatic effect on others, and does not shrink from examining a less laudable part of Douglass's life, his complicated and sometimes seemingly exploitative relationships with women.

This collected volume commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the first Supreme Court decision interpreting the speech clause of the First Amendment, Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). An all-star team of top legal minds tackle topics such as the history of First Amendment jurisprudence, critiques of that jurisprudence, its international influence, and the impact of new technologies. A fascinating and important volume.

Aurora Floyd is a genre-bending Victorian novel, first published in 1863, that defies the usual conceptions of the period. The heroine speaks her mind, rides fast horses, and tells lies with grave consequences—yet her fellow characters and her author understand, rather than punish, her.

A pleasant and easy read that puts forth numerous policy ideas that most of us can get behind, looks for a strong path forward for conservatism, shares detailed facts and figures that will inform the reader, and, in trying to frame conservative philosophy, ends up also presenting a broader life philosophy that the reader will be better off for having considered.

Bad Blood by John Carryrou is a well written “story” about corporate greed, over-trust, and the rise and fall of Silicon Valley’s Elizabeth Holmes and her firm, Theranos.

Carreyrou’s book expands on his excellent investigative reporting on Elizabeth Holmes and her start-up company Theranos. Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley, who was able to persuade legendary lawyer David Boies, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and former Secretary of State George Schultz to join her board and advocate for Theranos—the company Holmes said would revolutionize the blood testing industry. Carreyrou recounts Holmes’ and Theranos’ spectacular downfall in a gripping page-turner. I could not put this book down!

Outline by Rachel Cusk is the first of a trilogy describing the aftermath of an English novelist’s divorce. Cusk is an English novelist of respected standing whose earlier memoir Aftermath documents her own divorce. Its allure is less its subject-matter or plot (there is almost none), and more the gemlike precision and beauty of its writing, as well as its perceptiveness about the double-binds created for women by cross-cutting social expectations. Each book in the trilogy warrants savoring.

Much of law and economics asks what are the most efficient rules to govern property, contracts and criminal behavior assuming the government has the capacity to implement those rules. But in much of the world the government does not have that ability: bureaucrats either don’t have the manpower or physical infrastructure to implement any—let alone optimal—policies or are corrupt and can be bribed not to enforce those policies. What are the optimal rules for courts or legislatures to enact when the government has these shortcomings? This is a critical question but there is not much written on it. Of the little there is, Dixit’s book is a highlight. I will warn that the book is a bit mathy, but Avinash’s non-technical prose is clear and he has some neat insights.

How Language Began by Daniel Everett is another book to spark dinner conversations. It gives one a sense of modern Anthropology, Psychology, Evolutionary theory, and Linguistics. All those things I wish I had taken in College suddenly come to life.

This is very readable, though substantial book on the political history of India post-Independence. I am in the middle of new research project on the economics of India slums. A lot of India’s policy towards slums is a function of the Indian Supreme Court’s assignment of constitutional rights to slum dwellers. Those decisions in turn were driven by the Court’s efforts to revive its reputation after its weak-kneed response to Indira Gandhi’s suspension of democratic processes during the Emergency in the 1970s. This book is a great guide through that crisis in India’s history and provides great context for a range of Indian policymaking, including towards slums.

This collected volume explores the classical liberal perspective on a wide range of policy questions, from climate change to prison populations. Contributors from multiple disciplines, from economics to philosophy, include both admirers and critics.

Out of nowhere, my colleague Todd Henderson published this magnetic thriller. A work of fiction laced with Law School and Hyde Park realism, it spins a brutal political murder plot in Todd’s spirited no-nonsense style. Great read!

Mental State is a legal thriller written by University of Chicago Law’s own Todd Henderson. The debut novel is a page-turner that draws on elements of Todd’s life. The action starts with the apartment murder of a conservative law professor, but quickly the professor’s brother (who happens to be an FBI agent) realizes the facts do not add up. The plot then twists and turns from Chicago’s South Side to Pakistan to Pittsburgh and even to the United States Supreme Court. The book combines car chases and shootouts with debates between characters of differing ideologies on issues like the appropriate role of the Supreme Court. If you’re unable to regularly debate these issues with Todd, reading his book is the next best thing.

Of course I am reading it! The book is prescient: it was written 4 years before the Kavanaugh hearings but tells the story of a murder surrounding a functional Supreme Court nomination battle that is eerily similar to the Kavanaugh controversy. Of course it’s Todd writing the book, so all the usual assumptions and intuitions about good and bad guys are turned upside down. If and when the emotions from the Kavanaugh hearings die down, this book will be perfect for a Greenberg seminar where we ask about the ethical obligations of a Supreme Court Justice. In the interim, this is the perfect page turner for the winter holidays. (No I do not get a commission from sales.)

Selected Poems is a collection of perhaps the most interesting living English poet. At once deeply obscure and violently immediate, Hill’s rich and startling poems confound, baffle, and yet linger in the mind like unexploded ordinance. Comparisons to Seamus Heaney are both justified and illuminating.

If there's a better pure writer today than Alan Hollinghurst, I don't know who it would be. This lovely novel is set in Thatcher's England: a land (like Reagan's America) of commercial, stylistic, and sexual excess. Nick Guest, a young, gay, middle-class Oxford grad negotiates a series of love affairs while seeking his place in a highly class-conscious society. The plot, though, is almost secondary to Hollinghurst's beautiful sentences, whose elegance and insight are remarkable.

During a recent trip to Italy I read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo DaVinci. Not only a detailed look into his life, art, and science experiments, this biography gives one a good sense of life in Italy in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It is a wonderful companion when visiting Milan, Florence, and Rome.

In the last three years, N.K. Jemisin became the first novelist to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel (in science fiction or fantasy) for three years in a row, which she did for each novel in her post-apocalyptic Broken Earth trilogy. I recently finished the masterful third novel, The Stone Sky. I find it difficult to say whether I should praise Jemisin more for her writing or her imagination because both are astonishingly good, but probably it is her writing quality that stands out more in the genre. I'm happy to hear from other readers what they thought of the trilogy.

Tour de force is an apt descriptor for this book. Devastatingly clear, broad, and deep in its matter-of-fact outlining of how ingrained racism is in our country’s history, you’ll be haunted by the words and information, crave the next chapter, better understand our country’s past, present, and future, learn more about historical figures and movements you think you know well, and come away with a sweeping understanding of the interplay between different historical figures and moments and how it has created and fed racism in the United States. Wherever your intellectual starting place, this book will alter the way you think about this issue.

I have always enjoyed the Bernie Gunther novels of Philip Kerr, a dark series about a German ex-homicide detective that begins in Berlin in 1936 when he is working as a private detective often hired to find missing members of Jewish families. Kerr always did a lot of historical research for these novels, and much of their allure is in the rich context in which Bernie Gunther solves mysteries and escapes death. For a series review, see this New Yorker article. I just read the 13th novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts, after learning the sad news that Kerr passed away in March. The 14th and last novel, Metropolis is due out in April of 2019. I strongly recommend starting at the beginning, March Violets.

The Drowned and the Saved is a beautiful, heart-wrenching, and thought-provoking meditation on memory and guilt. It illuminates like no other book I have read how those who have experienced traumatic events continue to wrestle with their memories, in an effort to make sense of their past in order so that they can live in the present.

I have been reading Dick Lutz’s Hidden Amazon: the Greatest Voyage in Natural History (1999). It’s a very interesting account of a fancy boat trip excursion in the upper reaches of the Amazon.

The Patch is the latest book of nonfiction by the master of uncluttered prose. More like series of brief conversations among friends than fully scaffolded essays, McPhee again shows eclectic range from sports, watching and doing, fishing, and intergenerational influences of fathers on children and children on fathers. Many more topics, in shattering McPhee aptly calls a “quilt” of moments in his life, intimate without maudlin overtones.

Circe is the story of the mysterious swine-casting sorceress of Homer’s Odyssey, retold from her own point of view—by turns mythic and deeply human.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson was recommended to me by a current student who is also a novelist. Nelson’s account of a relationship that transcends and challenges familiar gender roles is a stirring exploration of love, parenting, and the relation of the political and the personal.

This summer I happened to be listening to the audiobook of Little Fires Everywhere on a long drive with my daughters, ages 8 and 12, and they became absolutely hooked on the novel. I spent the first few days of our vacation reading the rest of the book aloud to them as we pontoon-boated around a beautiful Northwoods lake. All three of us loved immersing in the experiences of the four teenage Richardson siblings and the new mother/daughter duo in town, whose appearance proves a catalyst for the Richardson’s and the entire town. Shaker Heights is itself a character in this novel, and Shaker emerges as shaken as the siblings. The novel opens at the chronologically penultimate chapter and then loops back to the beginning, so the reader knows the beginning of the end from the very outset. The central mystery is what happened to bring the characters to that end. The ensuing chapters are threaded through with enough twists and revelations to make the journey towards the known end thrilling, surprising, and totally absorbing.

Over the course of my lifetime, the number of breweries in the United States has increased from roughly 100 to more than 6,000. At the same time, two firms have consolidated control over a huge swath of the US beer market, with Anheuser-Busch InBev and Molson Coors now making more than 70% of America's beer. The story of Goose Island—a pioneering Chicago craft brewery that was sold to AB InBev in 2011—vividly illustrates both of these phenomena, and Chicago Tribune reporter Josh Noel tells it well. A fun read for anyone interested in the evolution of the US beer market, Chicago industry, and consumer tastes.

In The Essex Serpent, myth, modernism, and evolution collide in this gothic yet strangely hopeful novel set in an English coastal village in the 1890s.

I don’t read biographies very often, but I have thoroughly enjoyed Matthew Polly's Bruce Lee: A Life. When I was 12 years old, my father took me to two of his films and yet I never before fully appreciated how wildly improbable his success was before being cut short by his shocking death at the age of 32. Bruce Lee was poised for international superstardom despite being perceived by some as too Chinese for Hollywood and not Chinese enough for Hong Kong. And his life intersected in fascinating ways with 1950s and 60s film culture.

This is a readable and entertaining history of the word “liberal” (and “liberalism”), which began life as a way of designating character traits of public-spiritedness and generosity typical of well-bred gentlemen (always men, needless to say), before transmogrifying during and after the French Revolution into something closer to its modern senses. One lesson here, that the author doesn’t always draw clearly enough, is that the same word has stood for very different concepts or ideas at different times in history. This wide-ranging study shows us that to be a “liberal” in the 17^th-century was different than in the 19^th-century, and still different again today; it certainly confirms Nietzsche’s observation that “only that which has no history can be defined.”

Several months ago, while looking for something light-hearted to read, I stumbled across J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye way in the back of my bookshelf. Although I'd read it many decades ago, I had little recollection of the work. Out of curiosity, I decided to read it. It was a riot. For anyone looking for a distraction from the tensions of the moment, I highly recommend it.

This classic reshapes the way the reader thinks about family names, street names, and so many other little and big things that help the government to do both good and self-serving things. It’s also entertaining!

Fictional explorations of how property works its way into people's lives and interactions.

A Far Cry from Kensington is a mordant, darkly comic novel of one woman’s journey through the publishing world of 1950s London.

I’m reading Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for the very first time. It is one of the holes in my reading history that is still left from choosing specialty literature classes in high school. And it was an enormous hole. It seems silly to offer a recommendation for it because I imagine most everyone reading this list has already experienced it, but it is so vividly and beautifully written. The landscape and the expressions of the characters are sparse but perfectly complete at the same time. It is an iconic story of refugees at a time when we cannot risk forgetting what it means to be a refugee. It is a case of better late than never.

One of our very best federal judges examines the role of states in the American constitutional tradition. By looking at instances in which states and federal courts were interpreting the same or similar rights, Judge Sutton elucidates how our rights tradition is the result of complex interactions across jurisdictions, in which the headline-making cases are better understood as the product of a long conversation than as a single contest. It’s a wise reminder for our time that the US Supreme Court is not the only court that counts.

I have been reading on the history of improvisational comedy, which started in the U.S. in Hyde Park at The University in the mid-1950s. Sweet’s book consists of interviews with key participants in that era, including the Law School’s own Roger Bowen, who went on to an acting and writing career in Hollywood (Bowen played Lt. Col. Henry Blake in the 1970 film version of M*A*S*H). Unsurprisingly, there is overlap between this book and the two other improv history books that I have plugged in prior years (Janet Coleman’s The Compass and the much more recent Improv Nation by Saw Wasson), but the virtue of Sweet’s book is that you hear directly from the participants who created The Compass Players and The Second City.

A re-telling of King Lear set in modern day India that takes the antagonists of the play (Goneril, Regan, and Edmund) as the focus. A beautiful and rich examination of how power, status, and subordination shaped each of them.

Part memoir, part advice manual for startups. This a breezily-written book is full of insights into the intersection of innovation, regulation, and politics. The high peaks and low valleys of these professional adventures, as well as its sharply-drawn perceptions of prominent political and business leaders, make for almost novelistic reading.

I’ve just started Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence, an evocation of Old New York and its manners and mores. And the protagonist is a lawyer!

Who’d expect from its dry title that this book is a lively page-turner—a march through all of American history and a fascinating, gossipy story of battles over the constitutional rights of corporations? You’ll discover lots you didn’t know about familiar cases and famous lawyers and judges (Daniel Webster, Roscoe Conkling, Stephen Field, Lewis Powell, and many more) and learn about other interesting cases, lawyers, and judges too. Although the author, a UCLA law professor, writes for a lay audience and does so wonderfully, he provides a thorough understanding of challenging constitutional issues and does so without (much) ax-grinding. Even if your field doesn’t touch on business organizations or constitutional law, you’re sure to get a kick out of reading this book and to learn plenty too.

A quirky, funny, quick read that creates characters you want more of. You enter into their life for a brief moment as they confront a crisis. The writing is elegant and simple. The characters draw you in and make you chuckle. I laughed a few times while reading this and I can’t remember when I last did that. Just when you’ve become a bit enamored with them, the book takes a quirky turn itself, and then it ends in a sudden and somewhat unsettling manner. This isn’t your typical story arc.