Hickey: Books become emblematic of assassins’ psychology

The American media has always overanalyzed assassins, assigning monumental significance to their… The American media has always overanalyzed assassins, assigning monumental significance to their every quirk and habit. It’s one way the public tries to make sense of shocking tragedies — after all, mental illness, when it erupts into murder, is frightening, and it inspires a natural desire to comprehend the unknown.

Assassins’ bookshelves have been particularly scrutinized, ever since Mark David Chapman cited his obsession with “The Catcher in the Rye” as a key reason for his shooting John Lennon in 1980. Indeed, Salinger’s most famous novel would later be named as an influence for both Robert John Bardo, stalker and murderer of actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr., and gain a sort of notoriety as the perennial Murderers’ Book Club Pick of the Month.

Now that we live in the age of social networking — when peoples’ interests are easily available on online profiles — it should come as no surprise that much is being made of the books named “favorites” on MySpace and YouTube by Jared Loughner, who fatally shot six and wounded 14 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, Ariz., on Jan. 8.

The 22-year-old Loughner, a diagnosed schizophrenic who supposedly became obsessed with Giffords after speaking with her at a town hall meeting in 2007, listed “Mein Kampf,” “The Communist Manifesto,” Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” and George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” among his favorite reads, as well as several children’s classics like “The Phantom Tollbooth” and “Peter Pan.”

Conservatives cite Loughner’s interest in Marx as proof that he is a leftist fanatic. Liberals point to his love of Ayn Rand as evidence that he is a right-winger. Feminist blogger Sady Doyle suggests that his simultaneous devotion to both texts  — presuming that he fancied himself in agreement with both  — indicates that Loughner was “stupid.”

Salon.com’s Laura Miller is more charitable, arguing that “Loughner’s book list is also consistent with a bright, curious, rebellious teenager whose life has been arrested and derailed by [schizophrenia]” and that “it is likely that what attracted him to ‘Mein Kampf’ and ‘The Communist Manifesto’ was … their aura of the forbidden, the sensation that he was defying the adults around him by daring to read either one. The rest of his favorites — ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Fahrenheit 451’  — depict deceitful and oppressive regimes committed to squelching individual initiative and thought … a young man [with paranoid schizophrenia] probably would favor literature in which maverick truth-tellers are labeled as insane or criminal by self-serving authority figures.”

Of course, a more interesting question than whether Loughner’s favorite books demonstrate liberalism, conservatism, stupidity or insanity is whether Loughner’s favorite books — or anyone’s, for that matter — prove anything at all.

“Scanning a ‘favorites’ list to get a sense of whether you want to know somebody is a much-derided but instinctive skill of my generation,” argues Doyle, who links this necessity to the rise of online dating, where one often has to read between the lines of a person’s profile in order to determine whether someone is worth messaging or meeting in person.

Despite using Jared Loughner’s favorite books to confirm her diagnosis of mental illness, Miller comes down hard on pundits that she feels are making too much of his preferences. “By studying Loughner’s book list for clues to what ‘drove’ him to commit murder, commentators are behaving a lot like crazy people themselves. Paranoids are prone to scouring newspaper articles and the monologues of late-night comedians for imaginary coded messages that confirm their ‘secret knowledge’ about the world. But those coded messages aren’t there — it’s just random stuff with no special significance.”

However, Doyle might be right in saying that judging people by their favorites lists is something my generation takes for granted. I surveyed a handful of college students, recommended to me by my friends as being well-read, and most agreed that what a person reads — and especially what a person wants people to know he reads — says something about him.

Alex Weiss, a friend of a friend at Syracuse University, believes that peoples’ favorite characters shape their personalities. “People tend to live vicariously through their favorite characters,” he says, “and as they read more and more, they sometimes adapt these characters’ quirks and habits as their own, at least to some extent.”

Whether your choice of reading material shapes your personality or whether your personality determines which books you enjoy is a chicken-or-the-egg debate, but one thing is clear: Although most people doubt that the books listed as “favorites” on MySpace can serve as indications that somebody is capable of murder, many people our age do believe that there are insights to be gleaned from a person’s reading list. Undoubtedly, listing “Mein Kampf” as a personal favorite can be just as damning — if not more so — as those pictures from Friday night’s party.