Miranda

This one is not likely to be of much interest to non-Americans. This weekend I blew through The Originalism Trap: How Extremists Stole the Constitution and How We the People can Take it Back by Madiba K. Dennie. This book delves into the originalism theory of constitutional interpretation, why it's far more ahistorical than its adherents want you to believe, and some tracks we could take to counter it.

If you aren't familiar, "originalism" is a theory of constitutional interpretation that says in order to understand the Constitution, we must interpret it as closely as we can to how the original writers would have interpreted it. It posits itself as the most true-to-history and unbiased way to interpret the Constitution. It was also a fringe theory for decades, until relatively recent political winds brought it to the forefront.

Originalism traps us in the mindset of 18th century wealthy white men and refuses to let us progress any further. Originalism says if we didn't have the right then, we can't have it now. Originalism cherry-picks its history to conveniently arrive at a conservative goalpost no matter what the real story is. I wrote an essay in grad school on why originalism is horseshit, so this book was of particular interest to me.

Dennie does a great job making this book accessible to everyone. I would strongly recommend this as a read for any one in the legal or legal-adjacent professions, but I think anyone can read and pick up what Dennie is laying down here. She summarizes the history of originalism as well as deep-diving into its most recent developments (this book was published in 2024, so it's quite recent).

Originalism has a way of making itself seem inevitable, but Dennie reveals with researched ease how untrue that is; she shows the hypocrisy and insincerity of the theory over and over. 

Dennie doesn't stop at "here's what's wrong" either--she has proposal and suggestions for how to counter the outsized influence of this once-disfavored theory and what we as citizens can do to push back against it. On the whole, while there is obviously anger and frustration in this book--feelings I share!--there is also a lot of hope and optimism. Dennie calls herself an optimist at heart, and it shows. This is not a doom-and-gloom book foreseeing an indefinite miserable political future for liberals and anyone who wants to expand rather than contract the depth and breadth of our rights. It is a justified call-out to political opportunists seeking to dress their partisanship up as rationalism, but it is also an essay on how it doesn't have to be this way.

At a brief 218 pages (plus bibliography), The Originalism Trap is easy to recommend to any fellow Americans, both as a way to understand where we're at, and a way forward, hopefully out of this extremist quagmire. Dennie can occasionally be irreverent in a way I feel detracts rather than adds to her argument, but she is also dealing with incredibly dry material that the average reader will probably struggle to stay engaged with, so I can forgive it. Very glad I picked this one up and I left feeling hopeful that there is an achievable alternative to where we are now.

I picked this out of the free book box and October seemed like a good time to buckle down with a gruesome murder mystery, so I started into Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (if you recognize her name, it's probably because she also wrote Gone Girl). This book is about a newspaper reporter, Camille, who returns to her tiny, rural Midwest hometown of Wind Gap to investigate a missing girl.

What to say about this one? I'm struggling. It wasn't great, it wasn't terrible. I was engaged enough to finish it, but I also dropped it back in the free book box right after finishing it. I don't feel like I wasted my time, but I also don't feel inspired to read more of Flynn's work.

The book definitely goes hard on portraying women with capital I Issues, as well as the effects of generational trauma, be it from bad parenting, mental health problems, or misogyny. The toxicity of life in a small town is also a strong element, and the claustrophobia the protagonist Camille feels being back there, seeing all these teenage girls who seem doomed to follow the same dour, unhappy paths their predecessors did. The misery that these unhappy girls and women inflict on each other, perhaps in absence of a healthier outlet, also features prominently and heartbreakingly.

Camille herself I didn't care for. She's aggravatingly passive for most of the book and her own emotional distance (as well as perhaps the writing) keep the reader at arms' length from everything that's happening. Hated her love interest too; exactly the kind of arrogant, presumptuous type I can't stand. I kept hoping she'd tell him to fuck off, but regrettably she found him charming.

Flynn's writing style was fine, although I didn't always love her choppy sentences.

The crimes in the book are quite dark, but held up against the smaller instances of violence, physical and emotional, being perpetrated in this small town day after day, the reader is left to wonder how much difference there really is between them. 

Flynn shows well how the toxicity of Wind Gap impacted Camille, but I felt that not enough attention was paid to Amma, and why she alone among the family turned to such glee over violence and cruelty as an outlet for her trauma. This is one colossally fucked-up 13-year-old and I think the narrative would have benefited from more time in her head. 

On the whole: idk. It was fine? Flynn obviously had things to say about life as a girl in a small town, and I think she said a lot of that effectively, but as for the enjoyability of the book? Eh.