Luigi Mangione read “The Lorax” and “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” Hawaiian travel guides and books about spinal health. Among his favorites were “The Four-Hour Work Week” and “Brave New World.” Earlier this year, he wrote a measured, four-star review of “Industrial Society and Its Future,” better known as the Unabomber Manifesto, praising the author’s insight while noting that he had been “rightfully imprisoned” for his violent actions.
Now that Mr. Mangione has been charged in the murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare who was fatally shot outside a Manhattan hotel last week, his social media habits have replaced security-camera screengrabs as objects of online obsession. A now-private account on Goodreads, the popular platform for logging and reviewing books, that the police identified as having belonged to him has been especially intriguing to armchair psychological and ideological analysts.
Surely this catalog of the books he liked and the ones he intended to read someday might offer a clue about his motives, a window into how a young man with a privileged background and an elite education might have turned into an accused killer.
Was it the pain? Mr. Mangione, whose friends say had been suffering from a back injury, listed a handful of books on the subject. Or does his interest in Dr. Seuss’s eco-fable and Ted Kaczynski’s Luddite rant imply a commitment to radical environmentalism, a disenchantment with modernity also evident in books about agrarian economics and the wisdom of the ancient world? Perhaps those titles, along with “Freakonomics” and a biography of Elon Musk, point to a strain of wonky, techy, Silicon Valley libertarianism, a variant of the right-wing bro politics everyone has been talking about since the election.
Do Mr. Mangione’s reading habits place him on the right or the left? That question, inevitable in our current moment, maybe beside the point. The writer and cultural historian Mark Harris, posting on Bluesky, described Mr. Mangione as “a very recognizable type of young male ideology tourist” — a “This Explains Everything addict” untethered to a coherent belief system. Many of books named in his profile — Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Nearer,” Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens,” Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” — attest to an appetite for sweeping, explanatory popular social science.
On Mr. Mangione’s “Want to Read” shelf were “Moby-Dick” and “Infinite Jest,” notoriously hard-to-finish novels that languish on many people’s “someday” lists.
What do “Sapiens,” Angela Duckworth’s “Grit,” the Robert J. Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” “How to Change Your Mind,” “The Lorax” and many more of Mr. Mangione’s chosen titles have in common? They are all best sellers. And most of them belong to a recognizable nonfiction subgenre: books that fit comfortably into the universe of TED talks, podcasts and smart-guy Substacks.
Tempting as it may be to glean signs of radicalization from this young man’s reading log, the overwhelming impression it gives is of a very normal guy. Like many Americans of his background, his bookish aspirations were defined by what everybody else was reading, or thought they should be reading.
His Goodreads profile, in other words, is just what you might expect from a recent college graduate with degrees in computer science and a general orientation toward self-improvement. He reads (and wishes to read) books that will help him ponder the big questions even as he seeks practical advice about how to help his body and mind.
It’s possible that one of those books — or some combination of them — helped drive him toward violence. Reading sometimes has that effect, and it’s chilling to consider that some of the most normie products of modern publishing might have fed a homicidal imagination. But reading can also contain and moderate antisocial impulses; a reader absorbed in a book is, at least for the moment, on the safe side of the boundary between thought and action.
What is most revealing about Mr. Mangione’s Goodreads history isn’t what he read, but that he might have stopped. Since the beginning of 2023, his activity on the platform dwindled. In the past six months, it’s been reported, he also drifted out of contact with friends and family, becoming increasingly isolated. We don’t yet know what happened during that time, and it’s unlikely that any book or book review will explain it.
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