books

Well I'm about 200 pages from the end of 2666 and I'm not really sure what to think yet. It's very big in a lot of different ways, not just because it's 900 pages long, and there's just a huge amount to take in. This is the second very large book I've read in the past few months (along with Infinite Jest) and it's interesting to think about them both in terms of sheer volume. I like it a lot, is all I'll say for now.

The next two books on my list I bought myself last week after hemming and hawing for a while. First is Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt. Professor Markovits talked a lot about Arendt and the whole fallout from the post-WW2 Nazi trials. Eichmann's trial came way after Nuremberg, but it's still a question of being tried in one country for crimes committed in another. Given present circumstances and the hope that, if our leaders are too weak to prosecute their predecessors for the war crimes that were obviously, unquestionably, committed, then maybe some other country will have the guts to demand extradition like Israel did. Not to say that Donald Rumsfeld is as bad as the Nazis, or even Slobodan Milosevic and Omar El Bashir, but it's a matter of degree. They're all war criminals, but Rummy's just weren't nearly as bad as theirs. Anyhow I can't wait to see what the whole Eichmann thing was about, and why everyone is STILL up in arms about Arendt's book.

The other is Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I guess he's one of those guys that doesn't need his first name anymore, because I feel a bit silly or self-congratulatory or something putting it there. But I've been meaning for a while to start reading some more classics, and why not start with that? My sense of its context is a lot less developed than my sense of Eichmann, but I can't wait to read it, either.

But they both have to wait until I'm done with the last part of 2666.