Reading roundup

What I've been reading lately:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
   
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
   
3. Introduction to the Study and Practice of Law in a Nutshell by Kenney Hegland
   
4. One L by Scott Turow
   
5. The Prince of Providence by Mike Stanton

Gatsby and Mockingbird are re-reads, but I'm counting them because I haven't read them for over ten years. Gatsby was like I remembered; beautiful writing, but it left me cold. To Kill a Mockingbird was better than I remembered. I started reading it after dinner and stayed up until one to finish it. Both were worth reading again.

I'll write separate reviews of the law books. I'd recommend both.

JW has been after me for a while to read The Prince of Providence, the story of embattled Providence mayor Buddy Cianci. Buddy was a huge presence in Providence while I lived there. The book details his life and political career from the seventies, when he ran for mayor as the anti-corruption candidate, to his racketeering indictment a few years ago. While building his political machine based on bribes and patronage, Buddy revitalized the city of Providence and became its longest-serving mayor. If you're interested in political corruption or New England politics, this is a great read. I found it particularly interesting because I recognized the names and places, and had heard so many stories about Buddy. (Myth: his wife is named Nancy Ann. Fact: he was arrested after beating his ex-wife's alleged lover with a fireplace log.)

Currently, I'm in the middle of two books while waiting for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on interlibrary loan. The first is Reasonable Doubts by Alan Dershowitz, an insider account of the O.J. Simpson case that seeks to explain the verdict that so many people found hard to believe. The second is Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption by Randall Kennedy. The subtitle says it all. I like them both so far. Dershowitz's is somewhat self-congratulatory but a good read. Kennedy's is more scholarly; occasionally it puts me to sleep, but he brings up all sorts of obscure cases where race and family intersect in unanticipated ways.

Anybody want to recommend some lighter reading? I haven't read a really good novel (that I haven't read before) in a long time. Lately I've been going to the library and not finding anything I feel like reading, but my experience picking randomly off the shelves has not been good. Two books I plan to pick up soon, from other people's deserted island lists: Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner (I'm usually not big on chick lit, but I could use something fluffy) and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. More suggestions are welcome.

(In case you haven't noticed, I'm a big library fan. Free books! What's not to love?)

Update:

• Jonathan Strange is okay -- a good fantasy story, written in a purposefully absurd scholarly fashion, but I can't say I'm really better off for having read it. It was a good story, with impressive background information and internal consistency, but at 800 pages it was kind of a waste of time.
  
  
• Reasonable Doubts was very interesting. Dershowitz doesn't argue that O.J. was innocent, but instead discusses the "open secret" of police perjury, the high probability that the evidence had been tampered with, the unreliable witnesses, and the effect of the mostly black and female jury. On the last point, he argues that the prosecution tried to play to the women's biases by emphasizing domestic violence, but in this case race trumped gender as a consideration. He does not say that the black jury would automatically sympathize with a black defendant (and, in fact, suggests that they might have felt more pressure to convict, to show that they weren't acting out of racial bias); rather, the black community in the L.A. area was more likely to distrust the police and believe that O.J. might have been framed, based on personal experience.
  
  
• I also flipped through Christopher Darden's book, In Contempt. (Darden was the prosecutor in the Simpson trial.) It's a long, rambling account of his childhood and the racism he experienced. He doesn't talk much about the trial until the last hundred pages or so. When he does, he complains about the judge's unfair treatment in favor of the defense (in his book, Dershowitz also complains that Judge Ito is partial to the prosecution) and understandably expresses frustration that, despite the huge amount of evidence, the jury chose to acquit because they did not trust the police. Both he and Dershowitz mention the hate mail they received after the verdict; both were accused of betraying their respective races.
  
  
• Good In Bed sucks. I thought I'd give it a try, but I guess I'm really not a chick lit kind of girl. (Update to the update: Okay, "sucks" is too strong. This is a feel-good book -- almost like a self-help book on Loving Yourself, but in novel form. It's the book equivalent of an ABC Family movie. So I actually did enjoy it after getting into it a little bit, but it exceeds my fluff tolerance.)
  
  
• I got Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim instead of Me Talk Pretty One Day. It's little vignettes from Sedaris's life; well-written, amusing and sometimes sort of creepy, they're good for picking up and reading now and then. It's nice to have a book you can pick up, get caught up in for a few minutes, and then put down without missing anything.