with nine authors about current events (mostly related to the election). We took a look, paying attention to which authors recommended their own books (and how many). Here are the results. Self-recommended books are in yellow boxes.
Author | Q: What are the top five books you'd recommend to become an informed voter? And what can your new book contribute? |
Patrick Buchanan | Where the Right Went Wrong | The Great Betrayal | Pete Peterson's Running on Empty | James Bamford's A Pretext for War | John O'Neill's Unfit for Command |
Ann Coulter | High Crimes and Misdemeanors | Slander | Treason | How to Talk to a Liberal | The Bible |
Al Franken | Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked | Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling | Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty | Joe Conason's Big Lies | The South Beach Diet |
David Frum | The Right Man | Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong? | Richard Miniter's Losing Bin Laden | John Kerry's The New War | Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear |
Arianna Huffington | MoveOn.org's 50 Ways to Love Your Country | Bill Maher's When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden | Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack | Joe Palermo's In His Own Right: The Political Odyssey of Senator Robert F. Kennedy | The 9/11 Commission Report |
Molly Ivins | Who Let the Dogs In? | David Cay Johnston's Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System ... | Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics: Observations and Arguments | Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? | Paul Krugman's excellent The Great Unraveling |
Jon Stewart | Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude | Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow | Leonard Nimoy's Warmed by Love | Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain | James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by |
Gore Vidal | Burr | Lincoln | Inventing a Nation | United States Constitution | |
Bob Woodward | Plan of Attack | Bush at War | John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by The Boston Globe Reporters | John Kerry's A Call to Service | The 9/11 Commission Report |
For a while it looked like conservatives were much more likely to flog their own works when compared to liberals. But Gore Vidal, to nobody's surprise, came in second to Ann Coulter and, just to be different, decided only to recommend four books - the last "book" being the United States Constitution (similar to Coulter's last choice of the Bible).
Thanks Mr. Vidal, you've done it again!