Scott Turow's Reading List

"I’m loving Adam Johnson’s “The Orphan Master’s Son,” set in North Korea. The novel won this year’s Pulitzer but, more important, comes with the enthralled recommendations of writer friends."

"Then I read the book. It is profound and unique, a perfectly wrought account of what it means to give your life to art and to another person. I expect it to be read with wonder for a long time."

"“A Theory of Justice,” by John Rawls. It’s not beach reading, but I don’t know of a more lucid articulation of the intuitions many of us share about what is just."

"Among works of fiction, Melville’s “Billy Budd” would be my first choice, especially in the present day, when the sexual undertones that once dared not speak their name are so apparent."

"Although the eponymous protagonist of Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” wanders through many locales, the extended sections of the novel set in Chicago are remarkable for their vividness, humor and idiosyncratic insights."

"Probably “The Count of Monte Cristo,” which I read at age 10. Its account of prison escape, sword-fighting and long-nurtured revenge transported me, and somehow inspired the thought that if it was this exciting to read a book, then it had to be even more thrilling to write one."

"These days I think I would choose Malraux’s “Man’s Fate,” for that novel’s nuanced meditation on the great personal costs and redeeming value of political idealism."

"“Black Beauty,” by Anna Sewell, remains a star-dusted memory, because my mom read it aloud to my sister and me at night for months. I was no more than 7."

"John Updike’s Harry Angstrom, a k a Rabbit, who gropes toward personal grace through four novels only to whiff in the end. After I finished “Rabbit at Rest,” I wrote Updike a fan letter telling him that I didn’t understand how he found the strength to get up every day to write a book so sad."

"I’ve been known to come back to a book months or years later and finish it with enormous enthusiasm. The last one in that category was “The Tiger’s Wife,” by Téa Obreht."

"“Dom Casmurro,” by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, a classic of Brazilian literature, which I’m taking up because I’m headed to the country."

"“Revelation Space,” by Alastair Reynolds, one of those books I’m returning to, because of my son’s rapturous endorsement."

"It’s Herman Melville and it’s great. It’s a clear classic. It’s a pretty simple tale except for its gay subtext, which I think would be pretty obvious to contemporary readers but probably was not to Herman Melville. It’s about the extraordinary divide that sometimes arises between law and justice. There’s Captain Vere, and vere , of course, translates from the Latin as truth, and I think it’s his last journey. Billy Budd, who’s basically being, in today’s view, homosexually harassed by Claggart, the master-at-arms, strikes Claggart, and of course a seaman cannot strike an officer. And even though the provocation is clear to Vere, Billy is executed. But it absolutely breaks Vere’s spirit, and if I’m recalling – it’s been a while since I’ve read it – he dies with Billy Budd’s name on his lips. I read Billy Budd long before I went to law school; it stands on its own as simply a classic piece of literature about the war between duty and morality. It was the last thing Herman Melville wrote and he hadn’t written any fiction for quite some time. And the other thing that’s always interesting about Melville is he’s always had a noticeable fascination with the law. His father-in-law was Lemuel Shaw who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts. Melville wrote about the law throughout his career but most famously in Billy Budd."

"It’s still a wonderful read. It’s dated in many ways; it’s extremely sentimental. But it’s beautifully done – you can’t take a thing away from it. We hope that the law is less crassly unfair to African-Americans. I would love to believe that there’s less injustice to racial minorities – that our consciousness has grown, a consciousness spread in part by books like To Kill A Mockingbird . It’s an interesting segue between literature and the law that a book like that, which was so overwhelmingly popular, also went on to demonstrate why something like the Civil Rights Act needed to be passed. It’s kind of a combination of the fact that it’s beautifully done and also incredibly politically correct. It’s the oppressed and innocent African-American, the noble poor person, and the virtuous white guy who’s willing to stand up to the town. It’s a story we like to hear right now, yes. I think Atticus Finch is probably more admirable to lawyers than to other readers, so being a lawyer adds something to that. I often talk about Atticus Finch because people wouldn’t believe any more in a lawyer that good. Lawyers were supposed to be paragons and the reality that they weren’t always that way came with Watergate in the seventies."

"No, I don’t think it’s standard reading for anybody any more, which is why I put it on the list. Cozzens was regarded as a major American novelist in the middle of the 20th century, and he has fallen by the wayside in terms of public esteem. But this is just a very, very good book about a small-town lawyer. It’s ultra-realistic, which means that it is from that time when realist novelists believed that their job was to portray only the so-called middle range of experience, which other people might call boring. But it’s a really beautiful book. It’s a beautiful portrait of a time and a place. If anybody really ever wants to know what it was like to be a small-town lawyer in the United States in the 1930s, people whose grandfathers or great-grandfathers were lawyers in a small town and want to know what their life was like, I would say read this book. I would agree with that. The books I like tend to be more about character than plot. This is a book that’s steeped in the details of a lawyer’s life, and I read it while I was in law school. But it’s a wonderful book. It is, again, not full of excitement. If you want to read about car chases this is not the right book for you. I think he’s a very fine writer; I don’t think he’s either Faulkner or Hemingway. Hemingway basically changed the nature of the American story; although his macho side has caused him to fall out of vogue, I think his novels will actually prove to last a long, long time – even though he may have created stereotypes that people treat with some scorn. Faulkner, I think, is regarded by many, with great justification, as the greatest American novelist. His manner is unique, and the profundity of Faulkner at his best is pretty much unrivalled. He’s an amazing, amazing writer and he goes on that short list, you know; he can get in the ring and battle Tolstoy. Cozzens was not as path-breaking a novelist."

"I keep talking about this book, hoping that someone will reissue it; it is out of print, and I mention it because of that. First of all, it’s a wonderful novel. It is elegantly plotted and it’s about serious stuff – about a lawyer in London who’s turning 40 and about the approach of middle age. Obviously, some of the themes resemble those in my own books, which is probably what enhances my appreciation for it. He’s drawn into an affair and… I don’t want to say too much about it and ruin it. And oddly they made a British movie about it, I think it was made for television, and the movie was also quite good. But you know the whole thing has dropped from the scene, and so, all things being equal, I choose to mention it to remind people that this is a really good novel. Melville of course did that much more overtly and much more symbolically. Melville was kind of a Marxist before Marx, and he saw the world in terms of this great clash of ideas and values. And he saw the American dilemma of trying to deal with commercialism, which he saw consistently as soul destroying. Piers Paul Reid is not writing on as large a canvas; he’s just trying to compare the moral crisis in one man’s life with the decline in the country."

"Yes. I think it’s a terrific novel. It’s about a trial, and about prejudice about Asian-Americans in a small town in Washington State – again, a particular time and place. Again, there’s a surprise at the end. Odd things happen to books when they become movies, and a great movie was not made from this great novel, and it clearly diminished the reputation of the book. But it’s just a superb novel, full of really beautiful characterizations – the reporter who’s covering this trial, and his elderly lawyer who’s defending the case is quite a remarkable character. He’s old, he’s impotent and thinks of sex wistfully, yet his wisdom captures the courtroom. Guterson grew up in that milieu – his father was a lawyer so he knows whereof he speaks. The sense of what goes on in the courtroom is extremely realistic – it’s very good on the law, but it’s very good at recognising the larger political and emotional context in which any important trial necessarily sets itself. I think they’re a pretty round portrait of the problems of the law, the kind of human mess that it tries unsuccessfully to make sense of. Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed."