Welcome to a year of great books. I'm Laura Miller, Slates Books and Culture

columnist. It's time to choose the last book we're going to be reading in the

series. Joining us this time is John Dickerson, who you know as the

political director of CBS News and the host of Face the Nation, but who slate

plus members probably knew first as the magazine's chief political

correspondent and a panelist on the slate political gab fest. John, thanks for

joining us at What Must Be a Crazy Time for You. It is a crazy time. Thank

you so much, Laura. I'm so happy to have the light at the end of the

tunnel be this after the crazy time ends. So it's you're doing me a great

thing. So thank you. We have a short list of four books that we know you're eager

to read and we'll talk about them in a little bit. But first tell me are you

able to read any fiction at all during a year like this? I mean I try to because

it keeps me sane and it's you know I was a English major in college and so it's

my first love. It's what I thought I would be doing. It returns me to some sort

of past before everything got so hectic. But because I also do the Whistlestop

podcast which is an intensively and there's a lot of reading because it's

historical and there are periods that I don't know so well. I spent a lot of my

non-work time reading you know histories so usually I can just kind of get

snatches of reading done. I did get all the light we cannot see read this season

but fiction unfortunately takes a big hit during the campaign's year. I can

imagine. So you were an English major and I know that you're a bit of a

trollop fan because we were talking about that earlier. What's your taste in

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