Twas The Night Before Thanksgiving. Story and pictures by Dav Pilkey. Video narrated and created by Stephanie Kostuck, Alissa Brink, and Danielle Rotering for a class project. Music by Billy Haden and the Country Keys Turkey in the Straw.

I asked this question over the weekend at my home base, and said the answers made me feel better, because knowing other people have this problem makes me feel less dumb:

What book have you attempted to read, but could not finish?

The American myth of the rugged, self-sufficient individual is ever-present in our culture. Think of Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, a character based on the nameless “Continental Op” of Dashiell Hammett’s noir thriller, Red Harvest. The characters abandon the very concept of community. They no longer even want a name that could be known by others.

The myth, of course, is just a fictionalized reflection of a belief held by many Americans: the self-contained individual is all. The furtherance of individual liberty, with little regard for the fate of the community at large, is the only legitimate role of government. The belief comes with magical thinking (or cynical slight-of-hand) that unrestrained selfishness will produce more for all than selflessness, altruism, or compassion.

Charles Portis’s True Grit and the 2010 film version by the Coen Brothers turn the myth on its head.

Our relationship to readers reading in our presence is awkward. The reader is mysterious. She sends few physical cues of the sort we search for, consciously and unconsciously, in others. We abhor a lack of information about those in our midst, so we fill in the blanks. Seeing a reader alone in a restaurant, for instance, some no doubt think, “The poor soul must be lonely.” The reader, though, has ten thousand friends.

Political autobiographies and memoirs have become just another item on the campaign must-do list, like direct mail, kissing babies and rubber chicken dinners with suckers-who-would-be-donors. The lives they depict are, of course, highly redacted. So even if there was something about a bear in the past it’s unlikely to make it into an American politician’s book.

A woman so stupid she married Jonah Goldberg is the person Sarah Palin chose to ghost”write” her editorial collage of American exceptionalism.

Bob Woodward’s inside-the-White-House books always provide scoops and provoke controversy and his new one, Obama’s Wars, is no different, but with one vital twist: It is less a look back than a look around. Readers don’t merely re-live or debate, say, a president’s decision to start a war – nothing much can change that – but how he is now conducting, even escalating, a conflict at a key moment. The book concludes with an Oval Office interview with President Obama less than three months ago.

There’s as much to like about this book as there is to despise about the drug war, which makes This is Your Country on Drugs a fascinating read for anyone endeavoring to better understand the origins of the drug policy predicament that continues to captivate and confound American culture. Ryan Grim takes the reader on a fast-paced journey through the history of our nation’s love-hate relationship with drugs, exploring the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of both drug use and the enormous war that seeks to shield us from its consequences.

As someone who has been reading Arianna’s books since the 1980s when she was still Arianna Stassinopoulos, I think that “Third World America” is her most compelling and important work to date — and it is an important work. Her vantage point mediating between the insular political realm and a vast, interconnected online communications world has given her unique insights into the chasm between political groupthink and the way that ordinary Americans experience current events. This book offers a clear, concise warning to those who think an uptick in the stock market for a few days means our economic worries are behind us.

Paul Street’s new book, The Empire’s New Clothes, closely examines the first year of the Obama administration, critically evaluating it within a context of strong liberal-Democratic support and fierce – even hysterical right-wing opposition. Barack Obama is seen very differently by Americans. Many see him as a symbol of how far America has come since the days of openly-supported racial segregation and the terroristic violence directed against the black community. Others see Obama as a dangerous “socialist/Marxist” who is threatening the American middle class and crippling future generations with “big government” and “unsustainable” debt.