If you’re looking for your next great book to read, Kevin Williamson of National Review Online offers some thoughts about one genre to avoid: political memoirs.

The titles are the worst, as though the words “courage,” “American,” “journey,” and the names of various virtues were written down on index cards and pulled out of a hat. Consider John Kerry’s A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, Mike Huckabee’s Character Makes a Difference: Where I’m From, Where I’ve Been, and What I Believe, Tim Pawlenty’s Courage To Stand: An American Story, Bob Dole’s Overcoming Impotence: A Leading Urologist Tells You Everything You Need to Know. Technically, Dole wrote only the foreword to that book, but it comes up under his name if you do an author search on Amazon, and I have no doubt that it is better reading than Joe Biden’s Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics.

I must admit, I have read neither Biden’s memoir nor Dole’s preamble to full erectile function. But I think that the vice president may have a great book in him — not Grant’s memoirs great, but pretty great. I dream of Joe Biden’s writing a postmodern surrealist political manifesto titled Literally Delaware: This Book Has No Subtitle, which I suspect would be colorful reading inasmuch as in his role as under-cretin to the World’s Most Powerful Man™ he has access to the 152-color “Ultimate” Crayola set, though presumably he is allowed to use the included sharpener only under adult supervision. The book would be available only at stores in Amtrak stations and should be read only on the train, a piece of locative literature.

Give Hillary Rodham Clinton — she’s still using the “Rodham” for authorial purposes — a little bit of credit for at least this much: Her dopey books, Living History and Hard Choices, are free from the paragraph-long subtitles that so often accompany political books. … But then she’s also successfully truncated her name — for the purposes of public relations, she’s just “Hillary,” one name, like Sting or Cher. She’s certainly not Mrs. Clinton, which is ironic: All she has ever been in her life is Mrs. Bill Clinton. …

I have heard more than one thoughtful political observer lament the fact that Bill Clinton is constitutionally incapable of writing an honest book — given the man’s intelligence, his charm, and his genuinely dramatic life’s story, he might very well have written a real work of literature. But politics suffers from the same tendency toward dishonesty that U. S. Grant attributed to war: Political careers “produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.”