Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in reviews and bookstores. No surprise there, as somewhere in his forthcoming tome, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik mentions that Lincoln is the second most popular biographer’s subject after Jesus Christ. In the past few months we have seen (the titles are effectively descriptive): Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President edited by Brian Lamb (Public Affairs); Lincoln’s Darkest Year: The War in 1862 by William Marvel (Houghton Mifflin); Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press); The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination by Gary Ecelbarger (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press); Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 by Harold Holzer (Simon & Schuster); Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson (Penguin Press); Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins); and Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt (Knopf).

As the process of knitting a cabinet and administration has unfolded, rehabilitated plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln has been frequently cited, not the least of the reasons being the president-elect’s gestures and consideration of past and future rivals. (Mrs. Clinton being the chief example—in the same vein as Lincoln appointed Edward Seward as secretary of state.) I have no doubt that the Lincoln bibliography listed above represents fine scholarship for students and history buffs. On the other hand, though it falls under the rubric of historical novel, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (Random House), part of his Narratives of Empire series, offers a narrative true to the known facts and insights and coloration that are informative beyond a collection of factoids, dates, and such. Vidal is gifted with making the story a vivid, unfolding drama and presenting the dramatis personae from Lincoln and his coterie to the various eastern political establishment bigwigs as real and lively. Of course, Vidal was criticized (read: attacked) for his portrayal of Lincoln, and per usual, he gives better than he gets:

Although I do my own research, unlike so many professors whose hagiographies are usually the work of those indentured servants, the graduate students, when it comes to checking a finished manuscript, I turn to Academia…

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures… I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require…

 —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 1, 2008

I don’t know about others (though the common default explanation is some variation of attention deficit) but my reading habits have seemingly transformed into something unrecognizable to the Me of just a few years ago—perhaps even before the post-millennial chattering class preoccupation with announcing and sifting through the entrails of change, transformation, and what it all meant.

As an exercise in self-understanding/knowledge I decided to keep a list of what I have read in the past week. Now that I look at it, the only thing I can glean from it is that my primary literary preoccupation is no longer the novel, and in fact I don’t feel compelled to finish even the various texts I begin whatever their form or genre. One other thing, I have taken to leaving books in my car and whatever bag I schlep around—so as not to get caught waiting in some queue or traffic jam without some sort of escape appliance.

Here’s the list, in no particular order, and arbitrarily annotated:

“He Just Can’t Quit W” by Frank Rich
Res ipsa loquitur.

“The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama” by Frank Rich
Res ipsa loquitur.

A Strange Commonplace by Gilbert Sorrentino
An overlooked (you know what I mean) author that I had overlooked—I’m going back for more.

“Vote for Obama” by Christopher Hitchens
Even when one thinks he is wrong, Hitchens is interestingly wrong—meaning his reasons and arguments are elegant if not rigorous.

“Verbage” by James Wood
Wood sees, to his great credit, something missed by homegrown pundits.

Serena by Ron Rash
Rash is a wonderful storyteller, whose One Foot in Eden is a masterful tale.

Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik
I read the introduction to this New Yorker staffer’s forthcoming book linking Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both born on the same day in 1809, with great relish.

The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
So far the best of his oeuvre.

Indignation by Philip Roth
Roth is worth every moment you invest in him.

The King’s Last Song by Geoff Ryman
As far as I got in this story within a story I was riveted.

Hard Man by Allan Guthrie
One of those Scottish crime stories increasingly finding its way into print—I read it based on Thomas Perry’s blurb, which I should have read more carefully—yet I did finish it.

Our Dumb World by The Onion
The claim that this is the funniest ever is hard to argue with especially when you can’t stop laughing.

First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century by David Lida
Meet Mexico City and the brave new world, mi gente.

“Mad Dog Palin” by Matt Taibbi
Oi Veh!!!

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly
Though I avoid reading series, and I thought Connelly’s standalone The Poet was his best work, I can’t stop myself from continuing to read his Harry Bosch novels. This time Bosch meets the Lincoln Lawyer, Mickey Haller.

“Make-Believe Maverick” by Tim Dickinson
If even a portion of this article is true then American corporate media, of which Rolling Stone is a part, is worse than we all suspect. If not, one wonders how this stuff got published. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 24, 2008