One Hundred Years of Solitude was definitely the fiction highlight of this year for me. I still have not followed my cousin Wendy's suggestion to read At Swim Twobirds. Samarkand was a faschinating introduction to Persian and Central Asian culture.
I will have finished Democracy and Distrust by the end of the year, and it has been a pleasure. Big answers to big questions about how we use this thing called the Constitution. The book is a little bit dated (it was published in 1980), but it provides a sprited, fluid, eloquent defense of most of the work of the Warren Court.
Today, most 'big picture' legal argument seems to be about issues that were created by the legal culture of the last fifty years: affirmative action, church and state demarcation, treatment of gays and lesbians, the death penalty, environmental regulation, and tort reform. In this environment, a lot of the discussion of legal and political topics a response to these issues, and it can be hard to think big thoughts without being stuck in the present. Democracy and Distrust has helped me get behind the rulings that opened up these points of contention. It is a much better liberal backstop for arguments on these current events than the more recently published Active Liberty (hopefully the topic of a later post.)
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By far the best book that I read this year was The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon......this Henry James meets Jorge Luis Borges with a touch of the Twilight Zone.
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