We’re learning a lot, very quickly, about Luigi Mangione, the suspect who’s been arrested for the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO last Wednesday. News of the arrest was like a piñata bursting over social media, with everyone scrambling around, grabbing nuggets off the floor. There’s a lot that’s still unknown about Luigi, but there’s also a lot that’s sort of known, lots to be screenshotted and memed. It’s a Schrodinger’s Posting situation: we know everything and nothing, simultaneously.
Over here at Lit Hub, we immediately dove into Luigi’s Goodreads, which was briefly public. As I went through his digital bookshelf, I was reminded of all the times I’d done this same exercise in extrapolation before, scouring someone’s stacks to see what I could learn about them. How many new friends and potential hook-ups have we all silently judged based on books? It’s always fun, but how often have the assumptions deduced from the bedside stack been right?
How much can we really tell about a person based on the books they read? To paraphrase John Waters: should you thirst over Luigi if his Goodreads page is a little basic?
Because his book list is pretty basic. It’s standard dude-who’s-into-business-and-tech, featuring all the big hits of Millenial YA alongside business thought leader LinkedIn-core: Michael Pollan, Atomic Habits, stuff on “how we make decisions,” a book on Elon Musk, The Bullet Journal Method—which my colleague pointed out is a little too on the nose.
The one big, eye-catching book is his four-star review, with accompanying note, of Ted Kazynski’s anti-tech critique Industrial Society and Its Future. It definitely shocked me to see that Luigi has not only read the Unabomber manifesto, but rated it in public. And four stars? Leaving a star off seems to imply that he saw room for improvement.
But Luigi also gave four stars to Steve-O’s memoir, which he read twice, and to The 4-Hour Workweek, so I’m not sure what to make of his rating system.
Luigi’s also got Infinite Jest on his to-read list, which made me laugh. He also has Ayn Rand on his to-read pile—marking Rand down as something you hope to read someday seems more troubling to me than reading it. It looks like you got some bad book advice from a Libertarian and were too incurious to question it.
Luigi read and logged The Lorax, which is sweet. He also liked a telling line:
Things like this quote and the Kaczynski review are eyebrow-raising, and they turn us all into talking heads on a made-for-Netflix documentary: “Looking back, there were definitely signs…”
But an insight discovered in hindsight isn’t terribly informative. Look at it another way: we got a peek at another newsmaker’s media diet this week, who was revealed to have a collection of DVDs that included Borat, Sully, Batman vs. Superman, and season one of Mystery Quest from The History Channel. What would you make of someone with those movies? Maybe a corny but conservative dad? Or an uncle who peaked in his ROTC years? Or maybe, apparently, a deposed and brutal Syrian dictator?
Getting a peek at a killer’s books or DVDs is fascinating and humanizing. But these details don’t tell us all that much. This person read books and logged them online for people to see and judge, and we’re doing just that. We’re sifting, looking for a sign or a motive, for an origin of the violence, the cruelty, the sense of justice.
Scouring someone’s bookshelf and guessing who they are is one of life’s great pleasures, but the lasting lessons from Luigi’s crime won’t be divined from his Goodreads. I doubt the big takeaways will even concern Luigi. What his crime is dredging up are the things that are so obvious that we tend to look past them: We have too many guns in this country, and Americans can’t help but cheer for justice delivered from the barrel of one. Police look bumbling and incompetent in their pursuit of even the most high-profile criminals despite their immense resources, and those resources are deployed selectively in the pursuit of punishment, if punishment is pursued at all. Our health insurance system is loathed and built on indignity and profits squeezed from ruined lives and ruined finances. And many, many people feel only contempt for those who prop up these systems, and get rich in the process.
Looking at Luigi’s Goodreads is a lot like looking at a date’s books: we’re left with more questions than we started with, some fun, and some best avoided: Why didn’t Luigi finish The Hunger Games series? Will he log and rate his own manifesto? Which publisher will secure Luigi’s memoir? Who will be the first author to write a fictionalized version of Luigi’s story? Will he get to read Infinite Jest while awaiting trial? Or will he indulge in a comfort read, and crack open Professional Idiot: A Memoir by Stephen “Steve-O” Glove again?
With one big exception, Luigi Mangione’s literary life seems to be pretty standard for a twenty-something computer science major. Despite our best efforts, we can’t know him through his books alone; every extrapolation from his bookshelf is indivisible from his infamous decision towards criminal praxis. We know everything and nothing, simultaneously.
