If "summer reading" implies light and breezy, it follows that fall reading, especially in a presidential election, would be heavy at times and windy.
Here are a few of this season's election books:
* A new paperback edition of Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (Random House, $15) by Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joseph Biden outlines the "guiding principles" he learned early in life, including the importance of keeping promises, according to Random House.
* Of six titles that list John McCain as an author, the book that offers the most background on the Republican nominee is Faith Of My Fathers (Harper, $8). Written with longtime staffer Mark Salter and published in 1999, this memoir chronicles the lineage of the McCain family tree going back to Scots Presbyterian warriors.
* Books by Democratic nominee Barack Obama include Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown, $25.95) and Barack Obama In His Own Words (Carroll & Graf, $8).
The Dreams from My Father memoir was first published in 1995 and then re-released after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. It discusses Obama's search for identity and his effort to connect with an absent father and find his ancestry in a trip to Kenya.
Obama's 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, describes how his upbringing shaped his political values.
* A title that The New York Times recently described as showing "significant early success," The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality is an attack book by Jerome R. Corsi, who also co-authored a book in summer 2004 challenging Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam record during Kerry's bid for the presidency. The title of the Kerry book was Unfit for Command.
The Obama Nation portrays Obama as a radical who has tried to cover "extensive connections to Islam." The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster. Threshold's chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative.
"The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi told the Times.
* Not surprisingly, sales are climbing fast for a biography of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the relatively unknown Republican vice presidential candidate. The book is called Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment on Its Ear, by Kayelene Johnson. The author was a "writer-in-residence" for the Anchorage School District. Her previous books relate to history and travel in Alaska.
