David Axelrod Will Add to the Stack of Team Obama Memoirs

It looks like 2014 will be a busy year for book readers hoping to learn more about the inner workings of the Obama administration. Financial crisis + foreign adventures + re-election = The Lord of Rings, White House Edition.

It looks like 2014 will be a busy year for book readers hoping to learn more about the inner workings of the Obama administration. David Axelrod, the chief strategizer behind the President's two electoral victories, just signed a deal with Penguin to write a memoir about his partnership with Barack Obama, adding to a growing list of Obama confidents ready to spill their guts on paper.

The tentative release date for Axe's book is "Fall 2014," a few months after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's June memoir will be released. Both are likely to be beaten to shelves by Timothy Geithner's book, a "behind-the-scenes account of the financial crisis" directly from the Treasury's secretary's mouth. You're going to have wait at least a year for the slow-grinding publishing industry to get them to market, but put them all together into one big Voltron-like omnibus, and you'll get a nearly complete picture of the first half of the Obama Era. Financial crisis + foreign adventures + re-election = The Lord of Rings, White House Edition. 

(Completists can even throw in Steven Rattner's chronicle of the auto bailout and Vali Nasr's alternative history of the State Department, though those would be more like bonus tracks than essential listening.)

You're not going to get insider accounts of the Obama White House that are any more insider-y than these until the president himself is out of office and then he and Michelle and Joe Biden and maybe Bo The Dog, can get their books out, too. Oh, and definitely Pete Sousa's inevitable coffee table book of photos. As long as people have declassified secrets to tell, the book industry is going to be okay.