WikiLeaks cables, explained

Kerri Miller's Must-Read: Presidential reads

Next week, I'll be calling on guests and listeners to help me build a list of books that the next president should read. But today, I’m thinking about the free time our current president will soon have for reading — and I’m going to be presumptuous enough to add a couple of books to his list. First, nonfiction: Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air,” is a book to savor when there aren’t a dozen presidential fires to put out. Kalanithi died at age 37 of stage four lung cancer, just after completing his residency as a brain surgeon. But on his way to operating on brains, Kalanithi was a literature major, and his appreciation for the spare and beautiful phrase infuses his story with grace and dignity and optimism. Fiction: I want President Obama to start in the middle of Louise Erdrich’s wonderful social justice trilogy by reading “Round House,” winner of the 2012 National Book Prize for fiction. It’s a story that begins with a devastating crime, and unfolds to reveal how byzantine and toothless the legal system is, on and off the reservation. The book is narrated by the victim’s adolescent son, and Erdrich shows us the contrast in the ordinary joys of teenage rites of passage and the tragedy of the world that young man is growing up in. -K.M.

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