There are two books I am anticipating above all others, and yet I have only the vaguest idea as to when they're going to be released.

One of the books is the inevitable chronicle of the 2016 election to be written by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, done in the mode of their 2008 election volume, “Game Change.”

Much of my monitoring of the election has been done through parted fingers as I worry about the outcome. But once the orange blob of hate is successfully sent back to his shiny tower, I will revel in the blow-by-blow accounting of what happened.

As a journalist, Halperin is somewhat suspect, his frequent television appearances featuring a combination of conventional wisdom and horse race commentary that add little insight, but that essential blankness makes him highly qualified as a receptacle of gossip, and you know there are dozens of people orbiting the Trump circus who will be more than willing to throw each other under the retreating campaign bus.

The carnage will make an amazing spectacle, and Donald Trump's vellum-thin skin means he won't be able to resist striking back.

Pass the popcorn.

As fun as that clown show may be, there is a political book I'm looking forward to even more, and that's President Barack Obama's presidential memoir.

We know the president is an excellent orator. For my money, his homily to the congregation of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, S.C., at the memorial service for the slain Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney ranks up there with the all-time great works of rhetoric.

And based on what we've seen in his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” the president is also a very fine and thoughtful writer. The traits that he's occasionally criticized for — his deliberative nature — are ideally suited to the long, difficult work of producing a quality manuscript.

“Dreams From My Father,” a book written when Obama was a young man of promise, not yet a politician, benefits from a candor missing from the later “The Audacity of Hope,” which is far better than the average candidate book, but nonetheless suffers from being, you know, a sanitized version of reality, maximally palatable to a majority of people.

There are signs that the president is ready to stop being polite, and start getting real.

In a recent Vanity Fair interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the president said, “There's a big part of me that has a writer's sensibility. And so that's how I think. That's how I pursue truth. That's how I hope to communicate truth to people.”

In the same interview, Obama says he's been constrained from expressing those truths because of the “institutional obligations I have to carry out that are important for the president of the United States to carry out, but may not always align with what I think would move the ball down the field on the issues that I care most deeply about.”

We should be impressed with that discipline. Prudence is an unsexy virtue, but lack of it is why, ultimately, the electorate is going to reject Trump.

Part of me wishes that as president, that writer self had more opportunity to come out. I suppose the problem is that writer selves often feel free to express doubts, to see complexity, and admit to gray areas.

In a political climate where any sign of doubt is rife for exploitation, and each day is a pitched battle between opposing sides, gray areas get lost.

I suppose politics in black and white is OK, just as long as it's not orange.