The Best Books About Politics (According to You)

Here’s what we’re turning to for clarity and perspective on our current political moment.

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I asked for your favorite books about politics. You offered new reasons to read classics and drew out the politics in romance and fantasy books.

The last few months have felt like a political thriller, an epic co-written by Shakespeare and Clancy with a wash of the cacophonous political jostling captured so deftly by Richard Ben Cramer.

And since it is now the last day (observed) of our stranger-than-fiction summer, I want to linger for just a moment on the books you turn to to make sense of it all.

Earlier this week, I asked you to tell me about your favorite books about politics. I urged you to think broadly about fiction and nonfiction — no need for lab-grown political memoir here — and nearly 1,000 of you obliged before we closed our submissions. I read every single one. You came up with new reasons to read classics and drew out the politics in romance and fantasy books.

And, yes, some of you even submitted your own work for consideration.

The selection that follows is not supposed to be exhaustive. It does not include my recent favorite (Muriel Spark’s “The Abbess of Crewe,” which is basically Watergate but with nuns), because no one suggested it. But it is a list of books you’re turning to for clarity and perspective on how we got to our current political moment, and what it means.

Without further ado, I bring you the On Politics unofficial literary canon, as recommended by you. Let me know if you read one, and if you want to join the Robert Penn Warren book club that I will totally start after the election.

“All the King’s Men,” Robert Penn Warren (1946): OK. You guys love this book, which is a fictional tale of a populist governor in the Deep South inspired by Huey Long. You love it more than “All the President’s Men.” You might even love it more than “What It Takes” and the works of Hunter S. Thompson. I’ll leave it to one reader, John Armstrong of Raleigh, N.C., to explain why:

It captures the entire dynamic of politics in America. The messianic leader who comes to see himself as the embodiment of the people and then its higher self. Those who seek his favor, always jockeying for position, always ready to turn against him when they see a new vehicle for their ambition. The masses who follow anything that moves, and, among them, those few idealists. All that, and beautifully written.

“The Last Hurrah,” Edwin O’Connor (1956): This book about the political machine, as told through a fictional mayor of a city that seems a little like Boston, is “a reminder that everything old is new again,” wrote Tim Shea. And it taught Sean Sweeney, a SoHo political activist, how upstarts can beat incumbents. “We had to teach ourselves to do the campaigning that the book details,” he wrote me.

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