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

Apparently we are heading to an important election and many citizens and various aliens of all stripes, eyes, and ears are being besieged by the various soothsayers, talking heads, and comedians who make their living mediating American and world politics for the rest of us. Personally, I find our leap-year elections fascinating, though I am disconsolate that we no longer have commentators up to the task of vividly narrating these quadrennial jousts. Forget the workmanlike compendium of Theodore White (The Making of the President 1960, 1964, 1968, 1972), we have no Hunter Thompson (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72) or Timothy Crouse (The Boys on the Bus) or Norman Mailer (Miami and the Siege of Chicago)—at the least, someone needs to attend to the infelicitous gibberish coming out of the senator from Arizona’s mouth.

If you remember last week’s Obama/McCain tête-à-tête, much—all right, some—was made of who correctly quoted Herr Doktor Kissinger on whether the next president should have preconditions for meeting with leaders of nations we don’t like. Christopher Hitchens who, thankfully, pays attention to such things, was prepared to set the record straight (Obama accurately quoted Kissinger). And, of course, as one would accurately surmise from Hitchens’s The Trial of Henry Kissinger, continued hectoring the unindicted war criminal:

Finally, of course, there is Kissinger’s habitual fondness for any form of dictatorship. To have been the friend of Pinochet, Videla, and Suharto, while almost simultaneously fawning on Brezhnev and especially on Mao, is to have been a secretary of state who was soft on fascism—and soft on communism, too! Unconditional talks with Ahmadinejad and Assad? Why not? They are the sort of people with whom he (and Kissinger Associates, the firm that introduces despots to corporations) prefers to do business.

Hitchens, I might add, may be one of the few American writers whose grasp of the sectarian politics of, for instance, France—of which Bernard-Henri Lévy (known as B.H.L. and apparently possessed of film-star-type celebrity in his home country) fulminates in Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism—allows for some Yankee understanding (B.H.L.’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville is more relevant and accessible for Americans). Hitchens sums up:

This blending of a relatively modern prejudice with the oldest prejudice of them all [anti-semitism] is what sickens Lévy enough to give it the appellation “Red-Brown.” It is the “new barbarism” of his subtitle. Against it, he counterposes the values of the Enlightenment, the France of the Dreyfusards, of Camus rather than Sartre, of Jean Moulin and Pierre Mendès-France rather than Maurice Thorez or—B.H.L.’s true bête noire—that debased Jacobin of today’s French Socialism, Jean-Pierre Chevènement. The left, he insists, must renounce any version of ultimate or apocalyptic history, along with any mad schemes to create heaven on earth. A secular, pragmatic humanism will be quite demanding enough, thank you.

And though it is not his normal beat, writer/bibliophile Paul Collins (The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine) had some smart things leavened with dazzling erudition to say about John McCain’s verbal tic, his ceaseless use of “my friends”:

McCain’s meeting with parishioners at Rick Warren’s Saddleback presidential forum certainly was a friendly one: He referred to “my friends” another 11 times. In the week leading up to Saddleback, the senator also friended, among others, a crowd in York, Pa., (“Two years ago, I traveled to South Ossetia, my friends”); workers at a locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., (“…my friends, look at the events that are transpiring in Georgia”); and Iowa state fairgoers (“My friends, I’m all in favor of inflating our tires, don’t get me wrong…”).

…But as a crowd bludgeon in modern political speechmaking, “my friends” can be laid at the feet of one man: William Jennings Bryan. His famed 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention invoked the phrase a mind-crushing 10 times. Inveighing against “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan declared, “My friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” is historically considered to be among the most viscerally powerful speeches ever made by an American politician, with one New York World journalist reporting the crowd’s reaction as “tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.” The temptation to bottle that kind of lightning again is alluring.

And if you need to test my assertion of the degraded state of political journalism (Frank Rich and Gail Collins excepted), have a look at the recent New York Review of Books reissue of Mailer’s classic 1968 convention coverage, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (with an introduction by Rich). His description and assessment of Chicago’s stature and his asides on Brooklyn are just part of the pleasure of this vital book. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 8, 2008

It’s really noisy out there. “Conservative bloggers jab Obama on foreign languages.” (Huh?) Christie is getting divorced. There is a new cell phone. Angelina had twins. Microsoft cut the price of the Xbox 360. Freddie, Fannie, and Bernie Mac are a mess. Brett Favre wants to un-retire. There’s a new Batman movie.

The chattering classes are bleating and ululating. Except for Lou Dobbs—he’s braying. Iraq? Iran? Afghanistan? Forget about it. Mugabe—bad. Darfur—what’s that? Luckily, American political tradition allows for a lack of attention to the upcoming election until after Labor Day. Good luck figuring it out even then.

The problem as I see it is—given the immense amount of effort it would require for aspirants to good and informed citizenship to personally ascertain and verify the shit-stream of what we still call information—is to find voices and visions that one finds reliable and useful. To indulge the still-popular fetish for full disclosure (and lists), here’s a list of those to whom I pay attention:

• Frank Rich and Gail Collins in The New York Times
• Tom Engelhardt and his various associates at The Nation Institute
• Robert Scheer at Truthdig.com
• Jon Lee Anderson and Alma Guillermoprieto at The New Yorker
• Christopher Hitchens, variously at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair
• Hendrick Hertzberg at The New Yorker

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 21, 2008