Now, TechnoLawyer is soliciting reader votes for the best BigLaw column of 2011. The winner gets (1) an ego boost and (2) a virtual TechnoLawyer badge to display on his or her blog, toward bragging. (See below for the badge I received in August.) Since I’d love to have both the ego boost and the virtual badge, I’m asking anyone and everyone as well as their spouses, kids, law partners, and friends, to please vote for my column. You just have to sign up for a TechnoLawyer account if you don’t already have one, which doesn’t cost anything, and then click to vote. Here’s the info on how to do it, copied and pasted from TechnoLawyer’s e-mail; MANY THANKS to all for clicking for me.

HELEN W. GUNNARSSON’S BIGLAW COLUMN …

Goliath v. David: Five Tips From the Bench for Large Law
Firms That Square Off Against Solos and Small Law Firms

Vote for This BigLaw Column:
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Read This BigLaw Column:
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TechnoLawyer, incidentally, is well worth signing up for if you’re a lawyer. It provides useful articles for lawyers in all different practice settings, focused, of course, on how to use technology to help you practice law more efficiently. And it’s FREE (at least, the current e-mails are; if you want to read an archived article in the library, you’ll have to pay). I’ve had warm and fuzzy feelings for TechnoLawyer ever since August 2011, when the company picked my cover story for that month’s Illinois Bar Journal, “To Tweet Or Not To Tweet: Twitter For Lawyers,” as BlawgWorld’s Pick Of The Week!

I like to keep a running list of the books I read, the better to remember them (which writing about them on this blog also helps me to do). My personal Best Book Read In 2011 was the graphic novel “Watchmen,” by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Other books I enjoyed greatly included several by Alexander McCall Smith; Scottish poet Jackie Kay’s memoir, “Red Dust Road;” Suzanne Collins’s YA blockbuster, “The Hunger Games;” and Anthony Trollope’s masterwork, “The Way We Live Now,” which had been on my TBR list for at least a couple of years.

One book I especially enjoyed wasn’t even my idea to read. Knowing of my passion for Laura Ingalls Wilder, an intuitive friend surprised me with a gift at the end of 2011, Kristin Kimball’s “The Dirty Life.” Ever wonder what it was REALLY like for Laura to live with Almanzo and build a life on the farm together? After reading Kimball’s memoir of meeting, moving in with, and marrying her farmer husband, I think I have a pretty good idea (and, like Kimball’s husband, I bet Almanzo and, for that matter, Laura, had smelly armpits, too).

One of my resolutions last year was to read a nice, juicy biography. I had two in mind: Maynard Solomon’s “Beethoven” and Benita Eisler’s “O’Keefe and Stieglitz.” Alas, they’re still sitting on my nightstand, unread. But I kept that resolution by reading another thick biography I’d had for several years: Mary S. Lovell’s “The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family.” Lovell’s book was a good read about an interesting family, but I found myself agreeing with a discerning friend who described it as having “lost its moral compass.” To her, and to me, the author seemed rather too enthralled by the faded glamour of the unrepentant Diana Mitford, in particular, who married Oswald Mosley, an M.P. who became the leader of the British Fascists and, with Diana, was imprisoned for much of World War II because of their open sympathy for Hitler. Scandalous Women has more about the Mitford sisters.

Another aspiration of mine in 2011 was to read a Dickens novel. I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep that one. But in 2012 I hope to make amends by reading both Claire Tomalin’s new biography of Dickens and a Dickens novel I haven’t read before, since both were under our Christmas tree. I’m excited!

I did something new in 2011 that I plan to continue in 2012: I became a guest blogger on The Europa Challenge Blog. It was pure serendipity that I peeked at my Twitter stream one evening and saw Marie’s tweet inviting fans of Europa Editions publications to participate on this fan blog. Having already read several Europa books, I had no hesitation about accepting. Initially, I signed up for the fairly conservative four-book Europa Ami challenge level. But I like a bit of competition, so I pushed myself and surpassed the 7-book Europa Haver level, reading 8 new Europa books in all—which doesn’t count the several I’d read before accepting the challenge. For 2012, Marie has renamed the levels with a wonderful continental café theme. I’m starting out cautiously, signing up for the 4-book Espresso level, but I’m quite confident I’ll be able to reach at least the 6-book Cappuccino mark. As a lawyer, I love finding and thinking about the legal issues in the books I read. In Europa’s books, I’d particularly recommend Alberto Angela’s “A Day in the Life of Ancient Rome” for its brief discussion of Roman legal proceedings, Peter Kocan’s “The Treatment and The Cure” and “Fresh Fields” for his depiction of Australia’s treatment of the mentally ill who have committed crimes, and Jane Gardam’s wonderful “Old Filth” and “The Man in the Wooden Hat” for her portrait of a marriage from both spouses’ respective points of view.

What are your New Year’s resolutions?

In 1966, as a teenager, Kocan tried and, fortunately, failed, to assassinate Australian labor leader Arthur Calwell. Though he was found to be a borderline schizophrenic and sentenced to life in prison, most of which he spent in a mental hospital, he was pronounced cured and released from custody after ten years. He began writing in prison and is now an acclaimed writer, having received a number of literary awards as well as obtaining advanced degrees.

In “Fresh Fields,” Kocan depicts the descent of a fourteen-year-old loner into insanity. The youth, as the author refers to him throughout, didn’t seem fundamentally abnormal to me (though I’m no mental health expert). Rather, his mental unhinging seems to occur as a gradual result of his extremely limited socialization.

Kocan makes the dysfunctionality of the youth’s family clear in his first few paragraphs. The youth, his mother, and his younger brother are fleeing their home and the abusive Vladimir, who is his mother’s husband or partner and may or may not be the youth’s father. Kocan refers to the youth’s mother only as “the woman,” and she has no more than minimal dialogue and interaction with him. Though the youth is only around 15, his mother apparently doesn’t think it important for him to go to school. She pushes him to get a job and support himself, since she evidently can’t. He gets and loses a series of jobs due to his complete lack of experience and missteps that a more experienced and wiser person would never make. The hard knocks he’s gotten, coupled with the absence of any meaningful human relationship or social interaction, cause him to retreat into himself. He becomes increasingly obsessed and identifies with Diestl, a soldier character in a German movie about the aftermath of World War II who is alone, wounded, and bitter. By the end of the book, it’s clear that he’s going to explode.

“Fresh Fields” is the prequel to Kocan’s two novellas, “The Treatment” and “The Cure,” which I reviewed earlier on The Europa Challenge website. His stories and personal history, together with a number of articles I’ve written for the Illinois Bar Journal on mental health law, make me wonder to what extent isolation causes people to develop mental illness, or dementia. (From there, it’s a short step to wondering whether solitary confinement for misbehaving prisoners is ever a good idea.) If only more positive socialization were the answer for all who suffer; unfortunately, it’s clear that there are many other factors that cause or contribute to mental problems, some (but not all) of which can be alleviated by counseling, some (but not all) of which can be alleviated by drugs, and some (but not all) of which may be alleviated by more socialization.

You can read more about Kocan in Patrick Bryson’s paper, “Lunatics and the Asylum: Representations of ‘The Loner.’” We in the U.S. are not alone in having difficulty in funding and framing our mental health care system; see Inside Story for more about Australia’s mental health care problems. And NPR had a story recently about how to hold violent psychiatric patients accountable without punishing them for being sick.

Though it still carries a stigma, mental illness has touched most people’s lives. I admire Kocan and all those who are bringing their experiences out of the closet.

I wonder what sort of literature is being produced in North Korea these days. Though legal restrictions can,  ironically, actually foster the creativity of artists and writers–see the movies and comics created during the middle part of the 20th century in the US, for example–writers who publish works under totalitarian regimes sometimes of necessity obscure their messages so much that the reader has to work really, really hard. The Man Booker International Prize winner Ismail Kadare is one such writer. That’s certainly a high degree of creativity, and some readers love this challenge. Others can find it so frustrating as to render the works unenjoyable and even inaccessible.

I can’t claim to know much about North Korea, but, then again, I guess I’m in good company: even high-level government intelligence agencies didn’t find out about Kim’s death until the North Korean government chose to announce it. Two books about the country by western writers who visited there are Canadian artist Guy DeLisle’s “Pyongyang,” a graphic novel, and Los Angeles Times reporter Barbara Demick’s “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” You can listen to an interesting interview with Demick from the Sydney Writers’ Festival on The Book Show’s website.

And speaking of The Book Show, one of my very favorite podcasts for several years, I must say how disappointed I was to read of the departure of its marvelous host, Ramona Koval and of its evident impending demise. Not that the opinion of one US listener will matter to the Australian Powers That Be, but this seems to me a case of fixing something that wasn’t broken.

As the end of 2011 approaches, what are you reading?

But I’m not dancing in the streets over it, either.

A friend and fellow Illinois lawyer, Lee Goodman, posted thoughtfully today on Gaddafi’s demise, the ensuing celebrations, and the coincidence of today being Simchat Torah, the significance of which another friend explained to me a couple of nights ago. (Lee is president of MentorCLE, which has a presentation of mine, “Persuasive Writing for Lawyers,” that you can watch and, if you’re a lawyer, get 1 hour of MCLE professionalism credit for; if you pay for the credit, I receive a small royalty.)

A famous line from Shakespeare’s play, “Henry VI,” is “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Back when I thought lawyer jokes were funny (that was a LONG time ago), I thought that was hilarious. Since then, I’ve not only become a lawyer but learned the context of that line: it’s what an aspiring tyrant proposes to do to make it easier for him to assume absolute power and despotism, and it isn’t a bit funny. As I was pondering Lee’s post and the events of yesterday, I started thinking about what it must be like to be a resident in a country where such unrest is occurring and how lucky I feel not to be there and, instead, in a country where the rule of law remains strong.

Libya and Iraq seem very far away, not only geographically but culturally, and Romania isn’t that much closer. But periods of terror have certainly happened in western cultures as well, and even in the fairly recent past: Romania straddles west and east, Hitler was dictator of Germany within living memory, and there are those in Spain who still mourn Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who, though ruthless, did bring Spain out of the horrible Spanish Civil War and into peace.

Here are some memorable literary treatments of historical terror:

1) Can’t start this list with any book other than Charles Dickens’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” depicting life during the Terror in France in the years after 1789.

2) A number of people retweeted British author Adel Darwish‘s comment earlier today that the fate of Gaddafi’s body reminded him of the scene in “The Iliad” when Priam begs Achilles for the release of Hector’s body as he was dragging it toward the Greeks’ camp. Coincidentally, The Economist has a nice review of four translations of Homer’s epic poem and recommends sticking with Richard Lattimore’s 60-year-old classic work while checking out Alice Oswald’s recent “Memorial” for a reminder of how shocking Homer’s gory descriptions are, even in the third millennium after he composed them. (Hat tip: Arts and Letters Daily.) I picked up our household copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation, a thoughtful gift from my sister, and was struck by how opening it practically anywhere at random yielded a graphic, blood-soaked description of killing.

3) Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning  “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” provides a snapshot of life in the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo, as bad a ruler as they come.

Finally, Literary Kicks has an interesting post from last year by Claudia Moscovici on life in Ceausescu’s Romania. And Britain’s The Daily Mail has a piece on the demises of several notable tyrants, concluding with The One That Got Away: Josef Stalin, who, unlike his fellow tyrants, was never deposed and died in his bed of natural causes.

This Friday night I’m wishing for an end to terror in Libya and elsewhere, and a return to peace and the rule of law. Since Germany, Spain, Romania, France, Greece, and many other countries who have had awful periods of terror now enjoy peace and democracy, there must be hope.