I read Elie Mystal’s second book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, and now I have a reinvigorated hatred of the Hyde Amendment.

Mystal is one of my favorite political writers because he takes complex topics and makes them accessible and also there is lots of swearing. I always learn something.

Bad Law dives right in with voter registration. In America, we burden individuals with proving themselves eligible to vote. This is fine if you can you’ve got a driver’s license or some other form of ID, but if you don’t, then you have to go get one. That costs money and hours at the DMV, which is a big ask for people in low-wage hourly jobs. The state, not the individual, should bear the burden of proving voter eligibility. Which seems obvious now that I think about it.

Mystal did not set out to write a book that would win hearts and minds across America. He set out to write a book that help progressives make better arguments against bad laws.

If you like audiobooks, at all, even a little, this book deserves to be listened to. If you’re merely audiobook-curious, here’s your nudge to take the plunge. Mystal’s reading is delightful. He narrates like he’s having a conversation. It’s lovely. And there is this one passage with excerpts of the writing of founding father John Adams where Mystal goes into this fussy, be-wigged white guy voice and it is hysterical.

I listened to The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy, written by Jessica Pishko and narrated by Nan McNamara.

Eligibility requirements for sheriff vary by state, with some states requiring no education beyond high school and no experience in law enforcement. Unlike chiefs of police, who are appointed, sheriffs are elected to office. They answer to nobody except the electorate, which is not terribly reassuring, since around half of the races for sheriff are uncontested. It’s even less reassuring when you understand that something like ninety percent of incumbents win re-election.

These entrenched sheriffs are overwhelmingly white, male, and Republican, and a great many of those are politically far right. And as I learned in Pishko’s book, a whole lot of sheriffs see themselves as the highest legal authority in their county. For interpreting and enforcing the law, they claim supremacy above congress, the president, and federal agents.

Covering topics including immigration, gun control, covid mask mandates, and sundown laws, Pishko shows the outsize influence sheriffs have on social control within their communities, how they incarcerate people for profit and even as shocking numbers of people die in their custody.

Read Pishko’s book to understand how much power is concentrated in the office of sheriff and the ways it is widely abused

Squeaking in under the deadline for Women’s History Month is my re-read of the first book in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, The Wreath (1920), translated from the Norwegian by Tiina Nunnally.

Set in 14th century Norway, the book follows Kristin through her childhood and adolescence. Kristin is the eldest surviving child of well-to-do farmers, both pious Christians. She’s an obedient young woman, careful to mind her parents, her friend the priest, and eventually the nuns she meets when she spends a year living in a convent. If she is not overjoyed when her father arranges her betrothal to a young man named Simon, neither is she upset…not until she meets Erlend Nikulausson, a man whose reputation is already in tatters for having fathered two children with his married mistress. From the moment Kristin meets Erlend, all thoughts of Simon fly out of her head.

I loved this book in college when I read it for a class on women and religion. I still love it for the way Undset puts women’s lives front and center. Her treatment of sexuality, desire, the medieval Catholic church, and family makes for outstanding historical fiction, and eventually led to her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

But I have no patience for Erlend, who reminds me of Anatole Kuragin, who vies with Napoleon for being the biggest asshole in War and Peace. When I was younger, I admired Kristin for her impetuous affair. I wanted her to follow her heart. I’m still a fan of true love, but in my middle age, I am out of patience for men who behave badly. I’m not mad at Kristin but I am officially over Erlend, who was old enough and experienced enough to know better. Men who think with their dicks, nor caring who they hurt? This is not romantic.

The books are outstanding works of literature, and I recommend them highly, but I’m not going to reread books two and three. I done with you, Erlend. It’s over.

I have a small handful of writers I read every year without fail, allotting myself one of their books like it’s margarine and this is the war. Natalie Haynes is now on that exceedingly short list.

A Thousand Ships explores the siege of Troy and related events from the perspective of the women and goddesses. We meet Helen, whose face launched those ships; Penelope, whose husband Odysseus takes the long way home; Cassandra, gone mad because no one believes her predictions; Iphigenia, eager to go to the altar to wed Achilles; Clytemnestra, who plots revenge after that wedding goes wrong; and dozens of others.

Haynes is a strong prose stylist and a strong storyteller. I love how often she makes me laugh, even as cities are razed and infants are sacrificed and corpses are defiled. Her audiobook narration is lovely, so I recommend listening to this one if you’re inclined toward audio.

I like the first two Discworld books just fine, but with the third book, Pratchett starts to get his footing.

Equal Rites introduces one of the great Discworld recurring characters, Granny Weatherwax, who has just attended the birth of the eighth son of an eighth son, a perfect candidate to inherit a wizard’s staff. The ceremony is done and completed before the child’s father and the bequeathing wizard realize their gaffe. The son is actually a daughter.

Everyone knows girls can’t be wizards. But little Eskarina has a wizard’s staff, and there’s no taking it back.

It is not a coincidence that I’m revisiting Discworld during these troubled times. The books are a balm for the soul, funny and smart. And most importantly, they have an emotional core that makes you feel better. That makes you better as a person.

Book talk for February 25. What's everyone reading?

For Black History Month, I read Toni Morrison's Beloved, which may be the closest thing we have to a Great American Novel.

Set in Ohio a few years after the end of American slavery, we meet a Black woman named Sethe. Her mother-in-law died a few years ago, and her two sons have run away from home, so now Sethe lives in her house only with her daughter, Denver, and a trickster ghost. That uncomfortable stasis is upset with the arrival of Paul D, who knew Sethe back when they were both enslaved. Paul D exorcises the ghost and settles in.

Only the ghost comes back, taking the form of a young Black woman and calling herself Beloved.

Going into it, I did not realize this was a literal ghost story. I don't mean the psychological is-it-or-isn't-it ghost you get in some gothic stories. I mean this ghost crawled out of the grave and found herself a house to haunt.

This was not my first time reading Morrison, but I'd missed her best-known work. It is about the horrors of slavery reverberating through generations, so it is not a fun read, but it is a profound read. Beloved is essential reading for understanding America.

In America, Trump is attacking DEIA—diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility—though if you’d prefer not to use an acronym, the easy way to say it is: Trump is bringing back segregation. He hasn’t been in office a month and he’s already dismantling everything that makes this country good.

In early January, before this attack on America’s people and institutions, I started reading a couple of books about Black history, one fiction, one nonfiction, in anticipation of Black History Month. Reading this history feels more important now than ever…though with all the bad things happening, part of me wishes I’d picked something fluffy to read. A cozy mystery where the cat solves the crime.

Published to widespread praise on its publication in 2014, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, written by Edward E. Baptist with audiobook narration by Ron Butler, is a detailed study of the ways slavery and capitalism helped each other grow.

I appreciate how Baptist centers stories of individual enslaved people throughout. He draws on slave narratives, historical newspapers, oral histories recorded by Works Progress Administration employees, and other primary sources to flesh out the experiences of real human beings in bondage.

I further appreciate the special care he takes toward dismantling the notion that the South was fighting for states’ rights. This pernicious myth captivated American historians for decades. If you hear someone arguing that the confederates seceded from the union over the abstract notion of states’ rights, point them toward this book. It was about slavery. It was always about slavery.

Also, if you didn’t already want to punch Andrew Jackson in the mouth, this will put you over the top.

Most of my pleasure reading comes from audiobooks, but this year I’m reincorporating time for print each day, alternating between a Discworld book and a not-Discworld book. For this series re-read, I’m going chronologically by pub date.

The Light Fantastic is the second in the series. Lots of Discworld fans will apologize for the first couple of books, observing that Terry Pratchett hadn’t yet entirely got his footing. That’s not exactly wrong, but early Pratchett is still delightful. The gentle social satire he’s best known for isn’t much on display, but you still get a fun adventure fantasy with laugh-out-loud moments.

Rincewind, the wizard school dropout, is on the run with Twoflower, the tourist, because people keep trying to kill them. Rincewind only knows one spell and he’s never uttered it, so he can’t defend himself with magic, but he’s excellent at running away.

If you haven’t read Discworld yet, this book might not be the place to start. Lots of people bounce off it. But you might like it just fine. I do. I’m less concerned about which book you start with, as long as you start somewhere.

After listening to a meditation guided by Shinzen Young in my meditation app, I wanted to know more about him. I was excited to see he’d written a book called The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works. Books about the neuroscience of meditation are my jam.

Turns out, this was not a book about the neuroscience of meditation.

Meditation has made me kinder, more grateful, more resilient. I’m a better person for it. I want to take my practice deeper, and so I’ve been meditating more, with more intentionality, and I’m trying to read more about it. I want to understand better the mechanisms behind meditation. How does it, you know, work exactly?

Young’s book does not answer that question. Instead, he uses science language and metaphors to describe the practice of meditation. There’s some cool stuff in here, but it’s not what I was looking for. And he spends most of his time talking about concepts that are beyond me. Even after six years of a daily mindfulness meditation practice, I still very much feel like a beginner.

His discussion on impermanence, for instance, went almost entirely over my head. I still don’t understand what impermanence is or why it’s important to happiness and enlightenment. Though for what it’s worth, I’m incorporating his advice on noticing when things end, not just when they begin. The sound of a passing car might draw my attention, but I’m trying now to notice when that sound fades. But I can’t pretend I understand why this is valuable, despite having read the book.

Confession: I tend not to like books about meditation. I find the concepts too abstract, the writing too inaccessible. I feel the same frustration with books about philosophy and religion. Though I can point to any number of delightful exceptions, these genres as a whole are not my favorites.

Every January, I read a George Saunders book to start the year off right. This year I chose Liberation Day, a collection of short fiction.

Saunders may be the best of the contemporary American writers. Not the main point, but because he’s so good, he gets standout voice actors for his audiobooks. If you enjoy listening to books or are merely audiobook-curious, let yourself enjoy this book aloud. The biggest name is probably Tina Fey, but everyone is superb.

Saunders is hailed as a master of literary fiction, which is true, though I wish more people would recognize him as a master of science fiction, because that’s what half these stories are. Not the kind with pew-pew-pew space lasers, more the kind with mind-wiping technology that never gets explained in detail, for which fact I am grateful.

In trying to pick my favorite element of his stories in this book, I landed on this: Saunders is so good at writing normal people failing. Bitchy colleagues, idealists who choose complicity over courage, mediocre writers and their underwhelming husbands who make a halfass attempt at vengeful masculinity: None of these characters are straight-up villains. They are ordinary people who make disappointing choices.

No, I take that back, the parents in “Mother’s Day” are villains, and so are the parents in “Liberation Day.” They just lack the introspection to see it.

If this is your first George Saunders rodeo, this is a fine place to start, though my favorite collection is Tenth of December. His novel Lincoln in the Bardo is one of those astonishing books that can change your life. And A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is the best way I know to introduce yourself to Russian literature.