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Monday, September 13, 2004

The Ego-Meter:

Amazon.com has a set of short interviews 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!

posted by Quiddity at 9/13/2004 01:12:00 AM

10 comments

Am I the only one who misread ``Pretext for War'' as ``Pretzel for War''?

By Anonymous, at 9/13/2004 3:30 AM

I have long been impressed by Jon Stewart. I am even more impressed with his inclusion of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. At my age (74), I may not have the time to reread this book but I recommend it to those with younger eyes and open minds to look at the past (WW II) and compare it to the present. There are lessons to be learned.

By Shag from Brookline, at 9/13/2004 4:05 AM

Vidal's a genius. Although he's been branded a crackpot by the right and held at arm's length by the left as though he were a beloved but embarassing old uncle in the attic, he's been almost alone in calling things as he sees them, and time has more often than not proven him right.
If he wants to recommend his own books, then by God, Gore, have at it!

By Riggsveda, at 9/13/2004 7:56 AM

burr and lincoln are two amazing pieces of historical fiction which should be on everyone's reading list, so i can't fault the man for pushing them. on the other hand, i received _inventing a nation_ for xmas this year past, and i was never able to get more than twenty pages into it.

By jam, at 9/13/2004 1:03 PM

Frum recommends Republic of Fear?!

You could buy a dozen copies of that book for a cool 75 cents.

By Anonymous, at 9/14/2004 8:52 AM

I'm surprized that Vidal did not recommend his "1876". What a fine description of political horsetrading, lies on the campaign trail, and the Electoral College. Sure sounds like 2000...2004 to me!

By infoshaman, at 9/15/2004 8:14 AM

I'm thinking Ann's recommending the Bible as her fifth book because she doesn't know the names of any other books. It's clear, from what she's said elsewhere about Christianity, among other things, that she doesn't know the first thing about what's actually in the Bible.

By delagar, at 9/16/2004 9:30 AM

Ann's ego is so tame. Putting the Bible _after_ four of her own works.

I thought Gravity's Rainbow was just too gross, but Stewart's book selection rocks for its difficulty rating.

Should I read Mann's Magic Mountain.. hmmm

By JoshSN, at 9/18/2004 10:26 AM

The book that has made me laugh the most, apart from the collected works of Bill O'Reilly, and that has foretold in hilarious fashion various twists of the campaign is THE DICK CHENEY CODE by Henry Beard, author of "O.J.'s Legal Pad" and "Where's Saddam?" It parodies THE DA VINCI CODE and nails the bizarre thinking of the White House, political evangelicals, et al. Suffice it to say that the strange code "uggabugga" is used to skewer Bush and his henchmen, Skull & Bones is secretly breached, and Geronimo's skull is liberated. And that's only a subplot.

Cheney in the emergency ops center in the White House basement:

The last screen in the line had the FOX Channel. They were already running Cheney's doctored footage of Senator John Kerry using a flaming American flag to set fire to a pile of Bibles. The news crawl at the bottom of the screen was the same one the public saw, but this special classified version had all the outright lies circled in red.

Cheney crossed the room to a spaceship-style metal door. He gave the ancient ritual knock first used almost five centuries earlier....

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