I read books in binges. One summer in high school I binged on Wharton, conveniently located at the end of a long and tall bank of books at the public library, and finished the high by going to extreme measures to request an inter-library loan of her last novel, not quite finished at death, The Buccanneers. Other themes have been Brian Jacques, C.S. Lewis, historical fiction, Ayn Rand, or the entirety of my Nancy Drew and Cherry Ames collection, which a neighbor (and now, 17-year family friend) acquired from the library book sale at twenty-five cents per volume. This week at the library, it was a pair of politicians' autobiographies: Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama, and It's My Party Too by Christine Whitman.

Reading politicians' books immediately puts me on edge. perhaps it's because I know I'm already starting out on uneven footing, that their world is inconceivably more complex, more filled with intricate negotiation and navigation, and that by reducing it to concrete paragraphs there's an instantaneous and inevitable dumbing down of that complexity.

Strangely enough, I'm still skeptical and sullen as I read Dreams From My Father. Perhaps it's because I've taken a similar sort of pilgrimage, a return to a native yet unknown land, and found not the clarity or resolutation that Obama did. Strands of bougainvillea dress the walls of a hut in a rural compound, he tells us, but I'd bet a dollar that he couldn't recognize bougainvillea, that in fact he couldn't name any of the plants in Kenya by sights. That later, when he was reviewing notes or editing gallery proofs he had to phone Auma and ask for the name of those flowers in the family photograph, and anyway, Wikipedia says they are native to South America.

This skepticism comes, I know, from jealousy. Barack Obama has set out his ghosts on paper, whereas mine come in the scattered form of almost-irreverent thoughts when particularly provoked. Furthermore, his approach and his style broadcast elegance and integrity: in what I suppose is a good mark of a legal scholar, he argues with himself at every turn, failure, or quandary. In the foreword, a short comment on the national stardom that began to bloom years after the first run of his book, Obama notes that some details and proper nouns have been conflated for simplcity's sake.

Fine, then. Have your bougainvillea, because it makes for a simpler way to evoke what you saw. Have your bougainvillea, for extra lyricism in that scene. Have your extra lyricism, because it makes your writing seem like a song from the heart.