Booknotes 5.5

Shroud, by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published 2025, science fiction, 445 pages. I’d heard people say this was basically a better Alien Clay, but I felt the two books were quite different (and I liked both). Interesting ideas as usual. My fear of spoiling anything renders me mute beyond that.

Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America, by Adam Cohen, published 2020, history, 498 pages. Good book, though frustrating throughout because of the court’s frequent decisions in favor of the rich and powerful instead of normal people, and also because of slimy, underhanded tactics by Nixon and McConnell and others. I shouldn’t have been surprised by any of this, but still it stung. More and more, conservativism seems these days to me to be a blight that rots whate’er it touches and in many ways is fundamentally incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Saying this as someone who grew up fairly conservative.)

The White Album, by Joan Didion, published 1979, essays, 223 pages. Still loving Didion’s writing, about any topic. Liked this: a “place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.”

The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, published 1597, play, 96 pages. Rather liked it — lots of great lines. Fun (if “fun” is the right word for a tragedy) (it’s not) to read it after reading Ovid on Pyramus and Thisbe. Also, it hits quite a bit differently now that I have teenagers around the age of Romeo and Juliet.