Okay, so what no one ever told me about Eichmann in Jerusalem is how funny it is; and not only funny but my favourite kind of funny: angry-funny.

To each count Eichmann pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.”

In what sense then did he think he was guilty? In the long cross-examination of the accused, according to him “the longest ever known,” neither the defense nor the prosecution nor, finally, any of the three judges ever bothered to ask him this obvious question.

Not that there is anything funny about what Eichmann did. I came to this book, obviously, by way of Bloodlands and Postwar, both of which regard it as indispensable. And both of those books, good as they are, are hard going. As Ta-Nehisi said in a related context: “History is quite the burden. I am sorry about that. But this is the work before us.”

Arendt’s name is inseparable from her coinage: “the banality of evil.” And somehow I had walked away with the impression that Arendt’s book itself is banal, or that the experience of reading it is unrelievedly negative. And this is not the case. Arendt’s anger is coruscating. Her intelligence illuminates these dark places like lightning bolts.

Throughout the trial, Eichmann tried to clarify, mostly without success, this second point in his plea of “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” The indictment implied not only that he had acted on purpose, which he did not deny, but out of base motives and in full knowledge of the criminal nature of his deeds. As for the base motives, he was perfectly sure that he was not what he called an innerer Scheweinehund, a dirty bastard in the depths of his heart; and as for his conscience, he remembered perfectly well that he would have had a bad conscience only if he had not done what he had been ordered to do – to ship millions of men, women, and children to their death with great zeal and the most meticulous care. This, admittedly, was hard to take.

It is a little hard to take, isn’t it? I have said that the terrible question of the 20th century was “Why do you want me dead?” but there’s a worse question, isn’t there? It is “Why do I want you dead?” Are you perfectly sure that you are not what Eichmann calls an innerer Scheweinehund? I am not at all sure that I am not.

As a clinical diagnostician, Arendt makes Greg House look like Patch Adams.

Eichmann’s astounding willingness, in Argentina as well as in Jerusalem, to admit his crimes was due less to his own criminal capacity for self-deception than to the aura of systemic mendacity that had constituted the general, and generally accepted, atmosphere of the Third Reich. “Of course” he had played a role in the extermination of the Jews; of course if he “had not transported them, they would not have been delivered to the butcher.” “What,” he asked, “is there to ‘admit’? Now, he proceeded, he “would like to find peace with [his] former enemies”–a sentiment he shared not only with Himmler, who had expressed it during the last year of the war… but also, unbelievably, with many ordinary Germans, who were heard to express themselves in exactly the same terms at the end of the war. This outrageous cliche was no longer issued to them from above, it was a self-fabricated stock phrase, as devoid of reality as those cliches by which the people had lived for twelve years; and you could almost see what an “extraordinary sense of elation” it gave to the speaker the moment it popped out of his mouth.

Eichmann’s mind was filled to the brim with such sentences.

She examines him under the microscope of her rigor, and finds an ill-educated, failed vacuum-cleaner salesman, temperamentally disinclined to introspection, who rose to the level of his incompetence in a political culture that cynically exploited his particular traits. There were keen minds in the Nazi party, but Eichmann’s was not one of them. He was led into his great sins by his craving for acceptance, his intellectual laziness and his willingness to accept lies at face value.

By that much-abused word “banality” Arendt does not mean boringness. Eichmann’s deeds, if not his character, are too horrible to be boring. She means that Eichmann is inadequate to his place in history. Be angry at him all you want. He cannot even comprehend what you think he did wrong.

Despite all the efforts of the prosecution, everybody could see that this man was not a “monster,” but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown. And since this suspicion would have been fatal to the whole enterprise, and was also rather hard to sustain in view of the sufferings he and his like had caused to millions of people, his worst clowneries were hardly noticed and almost never reported. What could you do with a man who first declared, with great emphasis, that the one thing he had learned in an ill-spent life was that one should never take an oath (“Today no man, no judge could ever persuade me to make a sworn statement, to declare something under oath as a witness. I refuse it, I refuse it for moral reasons. Since my experience has been that if one is loyal to his oath, one day he has to take the consequences, I have made up my mind once and for all that no judge in the world or any other authority will ever be capable of making me swear an oath, to give sworn testimony, I won’t do it voluntarily and no one will be able to force me”) and then, after being told explicitly that if he wished to testify in his own defense he might “do so under oath or without an oath,” declared without further ado that he would prefer to testify under oath? Or who, repeatedly and with a great show of feeling, assured the court, as he had assured the police examiner, that the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape his true responsibilities, to fight for his neck, to plead for mercy–and then, upon instruction of his counsel, submitted a handwritten document, containing his plea for mercy?

As far as Eichmann was concerned, these were questions of changing moods, and as long as he was capable of finding, either in his memory or on the spur of the moment, an elating stock phrase to go with them, he was quite content, without ever being aware of anything like “inconsistencies.” As we shall see, this horrible gift for consoling himself with cliches did not leave him in the hour of his death.

Contemporary parallels are left as an exercise for the reader. I am constantly reminded of DW Harding’s phrase about Jane Austen: “regulated hatred.” I suspect that like Austen’s novels, Arendt’s book should be one that I return to every year.

Just finished this and am feeling all schmoopy about it. Even better than its prequel, A Companion to Wolves.

This is one of two collaborations that I think add up to more than the sum of their parts (the other one being Freedom & Necessity, which is pretty much an annual reread.) I inhaled Monette’s books about Felix and Mildmay (indeed I was carrying one of them, with a lurid cover, in the Bernal Heights playground when I was introduced to an English professor who reeled back from it and urged me to: “Read better books.” I should have said: “I’ll get right on that.”) but I find Bear’s kinaesthetic writing – every body always located in space and on a trajectory somewhere – distracting and sometimes difficult to follow. My connectedness to my body improved dramatically in my thirties and forties, thanks to two pregnancies, several 5K runs and some excellent riding instruction, but I still tend towards the brain-in-a-jar end of the embodiment spectrum. I don’t find it very helpful to know how characters are physically positioned with respect to each other and the furniture, and it certainly doesn’t shed any light for me on their interior worlds. Hand me smelling salts and the Henry James!

Here both Monette’s luridness and Bear’s tendency to gesture frenetically rather than show are, well, tempered. See what I did there? These books are excellent on the Love Is Complicated But Let’s Not Be Dicks About It front. They’re less reliable guides to Not Racefailing: it didn’t thrill me that the only named black human character is the enemy. (“But,” defenders will say, “there are also dark-skinned elves!” Yes there are, but elves aten’t real.) At least said enemy was depicted with sympathy and imagination. ANYWAY. With that caveat, this wolf stuff is all the good bits from Pern with far less of the stupid: a fun and sexy read.

This post on Cool Tools changed my life. I drive more than I should. I drive to the barn two or three times a week. I drive the kids to swim class and piano class and summer camp. I used to suffer grievously from road rage, on account of California drivers zomg! But since I started listening to audiobooks while I drive, my driving has become serene and Zen.

As KK says in his Cool Tools post, fiction and history are ideal. Well, as those of you with even a fleeting acquaintance with me will have gleaned, reading enough fiction is not my problem. My problem may indeed be reading too much fiction. But history is harder. It’s hard to read history after a long day at work and with the kids, with your head heavy on the pillow. I thought I’d test-drive audio books with some history I had tried and failed to get through in print. That’s how I managed to race through Georgiana and, even more dauntingly, Paris 1919. I got both from the San Francisco public library, on CASSETTE TAPES HOW STEAMPUNK. Then I had a vicious slapfight with the SFPL’s bitterly disappointing audiobook reserves (foul proprietary software with almost nothing available for Android.)

So I signed up for Audible and listened to Bloodlands and Postwar streaming off my phone. They are both beautifully read by Ralph Cosham, who sounds almost exactly like Kerr Avon. Which was odd, but compelling. The books are twins in so many other ways that I suspected Timothy Snyder and Tony Judt of knowing one another’s work even before I Googled them to learn how intimately they were connected. Both books consider Eastern and Western Europe as parts of a whole. Bloodlands considers state-sponsored mass killing by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as two distinct expressions of a single totalitarian impulse. Postwar examines the aftermath. I was very lucky with the order in which I tackled them. Bloodlands picks up where Paris 1919 leaves off, and Postwar does the same for Bloodlands.

Postwar is one of the best and wisest and most useful books I have ever read in my life, and I am a Judtist now. I’ve been praising it as the missing manual for the world in which I grew up, but it’s more than that. Judt – a reformed Marxist – takes pains to distinguish between Soviet communism, which succumbed to its genocidal totalitarian impulses, and Scandinavian-style social democracy, which didn’t. He is also clear-eyed yet hopeful on Europe itself as a model for organizing human beings that is neither coercive in the Chinese model or cynical and corrupt in the American way. Judt, who died of ALS last year, would not have been the least bit surprised about Greece and Portugal and the peril in which the Euro finds itself: he read the writing on the wall. But in spite of much of the evidence of his own eyes he argues for the continuing usefulness and relevance of social contracts that don’t inherently fuck people over, or arrange to have them killed. So that’s nice.

By contrast, my latest project is Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower. It’s a history of Al Qaeda, beginning in aftermath of World War Two. Narrator Alan Sklar is no Ralph Cosham, and until I cast him in my mind as my friend Bob Foster the genius Koreanist from Michigan, his flat Midwestern vowels seemed set to drive me up the wall. I am glad I persisted, because The Looming Tower is an Iain Banks Culture novel, with the West standing in for the Culture. Specifically, it is Consider Phlebas, because it concerns itself with the point of view of the enemies of the Culture.

The big question of the last century appears to be: “Why do you want me dead?”, for various values of “you” and “me”. All the answers are depressing. The Looming Tower follows Sayyid Qutb, the father of Islamism, as he studies education in Greeley, Colorado: founded as a Western utopia. Qutb is so horrified by people tending their gardens and women talking about free love that he turns against America altogether. It is as compelling and awful as a car accident. As Jeremy remarked: “This is why we can’t have nice things.”

The more I read history the more I hope to stay as far the fuck away from it as I possibly can.

“Well of course people are paranoid about suicide here,” Ron Flud explained in the County Coroner’s Office. “I mean, it’s in business, it needs tourists. Every resident’s bread and butter is based on this city’s image. And suicide doesn’t sell.”

Spoiler: it’s not actually about a mountain.

Imagine if Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion had a lovechild who became fascinated with the disposal of nuclear waste by way of Martin Amis’s Night Train.

“I think everyone’s a lot more comfortable,” Ron said, “if we keep a low profile here. Suicide is the most threatening thing we can encounter as a culture. It’s a manifestation of doubt, the ultimate unknowable. A suicide by someone we know – or even by someone we don’t know – is a reminder that none of us has the answers. So apply that to a city with the nation’s most frequent suicides and you might start to understand this city’s reluctance to talk about it.”

I never even reviewed the prequel to this book – The Magicians, Hogwarts and Narnia as reimagined by Curtis Sittenfeld – because the ending made me so mad. The hero-protagonist made a decision that was ethical and unselfish, and then (spoiler!) he turned around and did the opposite thing just ’cause.

Imagine my surprise! then, when this is actually addressed in the sequel, where escapist fantasy worlds suddenly cease to be consequenceless and people have to do the right thing, at whatever cost to themselves!

Also! You know how I do that thing where I say “There is a MUCH more interesting book to be written about what happened to Secondary Character X over the course of THIS book!” This is that book! I shall call it HERMIONE GRANGER STRIKES BACK.

Me: “This is a lovely book! The nice lady’s Thoroughbred trampled her and dislocated her shoulder and put a hoof through her shin so that her leg was hanging off by a flap of muscle and skin. And then she had adventures!”

Optimal Husband: “Adventures?”

Me: “Well, surgeries.”

I can’t figure out how to recommend this book without spoiling it, or how to provide sufficiently graphic trigger warnings without doing the same. So let’s just call it Northanger Abbey meets Being Human, with a generous side-helping of We Need to Talk About Kevin. It’s hilarious, but the comedy is (sorry) beyond black.

I felt yucky reading this. Regarding the British monarchy as my own private soap opera is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. And this is not the sort of book you can faux-justify to yourself as having any literary or historical merit. I might stick to the dead ones from now on. Dead plus thirty years.

This book was published in 2003 and in retrospect, all the guff about the Tampax and Squidgygate tapes being security intercepts or whatever is such obvious and weaksauce misdirection, how can we possibly have credited it for a nanosecond? Thanks for dulling our critical faculties, Murdoch, you poltroon.

Clever, witty short stories with a liberal dash of Mavis Gallant, as is only right. I liked the first one best. In it, Levy is acute on the frenemyships of women:

I don’t find your life as boring as you think I do. I find it more boring than you think I do. People in couples are despicable company. They play out their lives to me hoping I will reassure them they’re deeply loveable together and frankly they are not. All the same I want a relationship and I want it to be more exciting than yours so I thank you for setting some very low standards that I can only improve on.

Her view of my countrypeople, while probably accurate, strikes this reader as surreal:

Marly is the first Australian I’ve met who has any angst. I can’t imagine suntanned existentialists. It’s not possible to exercise the philosophy of despair while sitting at beach bars in shorts, drinking smoothies with the surf rolling and moaning under a cloudless sky.

That made me laugh. When I lived in Sydney I was dead inside.

Brilliant and chilling. A timely reminder that weird women (such as myself) should never get in any position where other people have power over us.

Borukhova’s contained, Cordelia-like demeanor at the defense table worked against her. Nothing came of nothing. “She had no emotion,” Jones said. “She didn’t seem upset. She wasn’t scared. If you’re innocent and being tried for murder, you’d be upset.”

Be exactly like everyone else, or suffer for it. Malcolm’s book is precision-engineered to afflict the comfortable. She is as troublesome as Helen Garner (high praise.) She’s also acute on class and privilege and their expression:

Whether to reflect the grandness of the Times or in accordance with a personal code, Barnard dressed differently from the rest of us. She wore interesting, beautiful dresses and skirts in contrast to the uninteresting jeans and corduroys and sweaters that Gorta and Bode and Pereira and I wore. Her sharp-eyed stories about the trial were as pleasing as her elegant clothes; not the least of the pleasure we took in them was the knowledge that Judge Hanophy would be irked by them.

Recommended to those with an interest in justice, women or writing.

These books are great fun. Theodora the barbarian is a witty and well-read guide through a solidly-thought-through, far-future planetary system. It’s as if the rest of the Vorkosigan books had been about awesome Cordelia, instead of poor old Miles.

Theodora rides in, a day late and a penny short. Whenever I have one of my profound insights I find out later that somebody had it first in the fifth century oldstyle and it’s been a cliche ever since. That sort of thing happens to me a lot. Back on Pyrene, whenever I found a piece of classical music that I liked I was usually told later that it was a big favorite centuries ago of the Poliker Secret Police, and they often played it when they were torturing people. Believe me, news like that can affect your self-esteem in all sorts of ways…

Doris Egan is better known as a screenwriter (for Torchwood and House, among many others) than as a novelist. My grand unified theory of screenwriting, inspired by the career of Aaron Sorkin and amply confirmed by that of George “Aargh, aargh” Martin, is that everything a screenwriter writes is about screenwriting and the unrecognized centrality of screenwriter heroism to an uncaring wider culture. The reason The Social Network is so oddly Not About Silicon Valley is that it’s actually about Hollywood, and how clever Mark-Zuckerberg-slash-Aaron-Sorkin is, and how dumb and pretentious everyone is who isn’t Mark-Zuckerberg-slash-Aaron-Sorkin. (He’s not an asshole, he’s just a very haughty boy!) And I could make some fanciful allegory here about how the Westeros dragons represent creativity and Wild Mind, and their skulls in the basement of Kings Landing are the Golden Age Hollywood studio sets on the back lots, dwindling in size until the species itself goes extinct, and Daenerys who walks through fire to resurrect them is Martin himself, but I think I just did.

Ivory belongs in the same genre, though without Sorkin’s increasingly unpalatable narcissism. Theodora is a bookish anthropologist stranded on a strange, sunlit planet where everyone else is gobsmackingly beautiful, but she maintains an excellent sense of humour about it.

His distorted view of marriage, distorted in its way as mine, is like an anchor: he’s unreasonably prejudiced in my favor, just because I had the good sense to marry him. So he’s willing to put up with a great deal, too, and just assume that my intentions are good.

That’s an attitude worth gold. It’s not why I married him, but I’m beginning to see that people get married for reasons that are different from the reasons they don’t get divorced.

Theodora is also a masseuse, and I am firmly of the opinion that massage-trained action heroines are underrepresented in literature.

This was not very good on horses, and not very good on the war. So, um. He seems like a nice person?

Also! That’s a Western (as in cowboy) show halter on the horse on the cover! I just. Gnnrh.

The bloodlands lie between Berlin and Moscow. You’ve read parts of this history before, but Timothy Snyder’s contribution (a great one) is to change the frame of reference. His subject is the decade and a half of mass death in these lands, considered as the outcome of deliberate policies on the part of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany. Snyder’s story thus transcends national and ethnographic boundaries and the ideological differences between Hitler and Stalin to discuss how institutional genocide was allowed to take place. In Europe. And no one cared.

It is, as you might imagine, depressing. Parts of it are heartbreaking. Parts of it are nauseating.

It’s amazing.

It’s effectively the sequel to Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and a companion to both Deathless and The Hare With The Amber Eyes. The other book that keeps nagging at me is Helen Darville-Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed The Paper (no link love for you, lady: you know why) which considered the Holocaust as some sort of legitimate revenge for the Ukrainian famine… of course she was a liar, as it turned out. But that’s my country for you: people lying about genocide for notoriety. (Hi, Keith Windschuttle!)

I’m listening to it in the car, which is a good way of forcing yourself to keep going. The narrator has a very particular diction, with clipped enunciation and a downward inflection. I couldn’t place it for a while, then I realized who it reminded me of: Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon. Which is downright unsettling.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a girl in possession of a retirement-level liquidity event must be in want of a tax shelter.

From The Truth About Grief:

Allan Kellehear, the Australian sociologist, wrote in 2005, “Australian ways of grieving… are not logical outcomes of our local experience but are rather socially constructed ways of understanding inherited from a variety of dominant foreign influences.”

From Among Others:

It wasn’t that we didn’t know history. Even if you only count the real world, we knew more history than most people. We’d been taught about cavemen and Normans and Tudors. We knew about Greeks and Romans. We knew masses of personal stories about World War II. We even knew quite a lot of family history. It just didn’t connect us to the landscape. And it was the landscape that formed us, that made us who we were as we grew in it, that affected everything. We thought we were living in a fantasy landscape when actually we were living in a science fictional one…

It’s amazing how large the things are that it’s possible to overlook.

Homework supervision, piano practice supervision, roast chicken with kale, yams and spinach salad, dinner all sitting up at the table, bedtime at the official house standard bedtime and no later. And then! After reading Claire a chapter of The Little White Horse, then my daily mandated five hundred words on the novel?

Jesus God, this fiction gig is freakin hard! (And parenting’s no picnic either.)

The smugness when I actually hit the word count, though! The meaningless bullshit sense of achievement! The glow.

Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, on the other hand, are terrible, atrocious people.

After my first year at uni I got a summer gig on an archaeological dig at Port Arthur, the big Colonial gaol site and open air museum on the Tasman Peninsula. It was fantastic, my first adventure away from home, prefiguring Ireland and America. I got to try on different selves and to spend my days in hard physical labour and my evenings flirting and learning to cook. (Zucchini should be peeled and sliced and blanched and served with pepper and too much butter. Whatever you do to them, eels hand-caught out of the well are gross.) And despite its awful history Port Arthur was, and is, gobsmackingly beautiful. Every Benthamite Panopticon should be built out of sandstone and set in parkland, on a cove.

In 1996 there was a huge, terrible massacre there. The person responsible has said that he did it in order to be famous, and so I have not spoken or written his name since I read that, fifteen years ago. (Boy, I sure showed him!) But my desire to expunge his infamy reflected a deeper conviction that the massacre was an aberration, a rain of lead from the sky. It wasn’t about Port Arthur. It wasn’t some terrible reflection on human nature (Port Arthur’s awful history is that.) It wasn’t how life is. I resist all efforts by heartless men with guns to define the human condition.

The Columbine book is super-interesting in this way, because it discusses Eric Harris as a fully-fledged psychopath. (Dylan Klebold’s is a very different case.) Harris was, as far as anyone can tell, clinically aberrant; as if incapable of empathy at the genetic level. He was a rain of lead from the sky. He doesn’t tell us anything about bullying or nerds or people who wear trench coats or social life in American high schools. He is a natural disaster, like a hurricane or a flood. And this is most movingly expressed by Patrick Ireland, who is best remembered for climbing out a window with blood pouring from the bullet wound in his head. What kept him going through the hours it took him to crawl to the window? Not hope, as it turned out. Trust. At his valedictorian address to his class, Ireland said:

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That’s what I need to tell you: I knew the loving world was there all the time.”

Life is mysterious and amazing.

Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

Another no-contest. A Place of Greater Safety is crazy-wonderful and amazing, but Wolf Hall was the first. About 200 pages in, I was no longer Rachel sitting in front of a novel. I was Thomas Cromwell walking to the Palace to meet the King.

That, in case you’re wondering, is why I read.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.