Slavery and the Supreme Court

Slavery and the Supreme Court, 1825-1861 by Earl M. Maltz


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Straight legal history, with a few side trips into SCOTUS Justice Biography and political history. Dry as dust, and kind of frustrating for the way it gestures casually at the thing I’m actually interested in without following through: the psychology of a legal regime wrestling with slavery and trying to keep the Union together. This book just rattles off some conclusory statements about what each Justice believed of the rightness and legality of slavery, then says something almost glib about recourse to neutral principles for decision-making, without ever really engaging with all the snarled tensions there. And you can’t tell me there aren’t historical documents.

To be fair, other people have tackled that project, and this book was – I think – deliberately meant as a purely legal historical project. I just happened not to find it useful or interesting.

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Inkheart

Inkheart by Cornelia Funke


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Young adult, about a twelve-year-old girl and her father who can read people and objects out of books into reality, and the other way around.

Puzzled – I should have loved this, and just . . . didn’t. I mean, it’s all about metafiction and rewriting narratives, and you’d think I’d be all over this like white on rice, yeah? And yet, it never even twigged beyond vague esthetic interest; I certainly never gave a damn about a single character’s existence.

Best guess? I think this book is exactly wrong, style-wise for me. I just do not get a story all about loving books so much you just fall into them and they come alive, when the story itself works so hard for distance with omniscient POV, and choppy chapters, and distracting epigraphs everywhere. How does that seem like a good set of choices?

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