It’s safe to say Washington is one of the better-documented cities on Earth. Last year alone, the roster of books set in and around here included headline-snagging national bestsellers (Michael Wolff’s devastating account of the Trump-era capital, which sold 1.7 million copies in three weeks) as well as slightly less buzzy works (George Mason professor Dae Young Kim’s study of how information technology affects the region’s Korean immigrants, which almost certainly did not sell 1.7 million copies).

But what would you read if you really wanted to understand the place? It’s a tricky question, even if you can get people to agree on what constitutes a “Washington” book anyway. A complete library would include human stories set in everyday neighborhoods and heroic tales of globetrotting statesmen—but also poison-pen political memoirs and reportage on now-forgotten Beltway scandals.

Rather than answer the question ourselves, we invited a long list of locals to send nominees. We made the mission simple: We weren’t looking for the best books, necessarily. We were seeking the ones they’d recommend to someone who wanted to know what makes our region tick.

Suggestions ranged from 1816’s A Chorographical and Statistical Description of the District of Columbia, the Seat of the General Government of the United States by David Bailie Warden (“A key book to understanding what the District was like in its earliest days and why President Washington chose the area,” said Matthew Gilmore, a D.C. Policy Center fellow) to For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics by Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore (“We get to see how Washington works from the perspectives of four black women who have risen through different ranks over three decades,” said Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart). And though we had to exclude a few—New York Times columnist and DC native Maureen Dowd’s choices included Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth—we tried to keep our definition as inclusive as possible as we winnowed the field. Here’s a start.

Political Fiction

Advise and Consent by Allen Drury

“Advise and Consent is one of those classics that you’ve heard of a million times. But I didn’t read it until last year, when I saw an interview John McCain gave before his death to the Times Book Review. He said something like, ‘This is not only a great Washington novel but the most accurate account of Washington.’ I found that to be true. It’s almost a fictionalized version of Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, about LBJ. Advise and Consent shows, for example, that the Senate is made up not of abstract ideologies but real people. It’s still the best portrait of the Senate as a living, breathing institution of individuals driven by their own histories and concerns, and how that dynamic works.

“It’s certainly a period piece—parts are highly specific to Cold War–vintage, pre-women’s-liberation, pre-gay-liberation DC: the majority leader who lives in the Sheraton Park Hotel in Woodley Park, the big parties given by his girlfriend—sort of based on the famous hostess Perle Mesta—where lots of Washington business gets transacted. Characters are concerned about editorials in print newspapers as driving events.

“But much remains relevant to the Trump era. At its heart is this oddly progressive take on a senator who had a gay affair in World War II, and the threatened exposure of the affair becomes the centerpiece of the tragedy surrounding a Secretary of State confirmation fight. That part resonates across the decades, and it’s the reason why if you Google ‘Brett Kavanaugh and Advise and Consent Allen Drury,’ you’ll get a lot of hits.”

—Susan Glasser, as told to Luke Mullins

Political Fiction: Five More

Other Fiction

Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

I hadn’t read the book in 20 years. Yet when I revisited its first lines, that sense of being baptized into something new—something that would set its own rules and become necessary and important—the feeling came back in a flash. The stories in this debut collection from 1992, which established the author’s meditative, deeply humanistic style, are masterpieces. Jones is the griot of black DC, the archaeologist of the tangle of tragedy and bittersweetness that is the grit and the soil of our lives.

Here, the city is a landscape of boundaries and borders, migration and flight, loss and renewal. It becomes such a breathing organism that we feel the tremor as its heart breaks, just as we see it occasionally smile at a wall torn down, a race finally won. Jones writes of one character, “In both his lives, he had never come down to the world below Constitution Avenue.” Seaton Elementary is where a first-grader learns of her mother’s inability to read. Characters take the G2 bus “all the way down P Street crossing 16th Street into the land of white people.”

Since these stories were written, the streets and communities in them, rendered with surgical love and care, have been transformed. Glass office buildings, modern condos, grocery stores as alluring as cathedrals have replaced the rooming houses and walled-off lives of Jones’s people. Yet DC remains much the same: a city of quadrants that rarely intersect, races that seldom mix. These are characters whose small lives are startling, majestic, heroic. Devoid of sentiment yet shot through with an understanding of love and despair. A grandfather warns a grandson, “Don’t get lost in the city,” but this book reminds us we are always in some way lost. And what we call living is just finding our way home.

—Marita Golden

Other Fiction: Five More

How Washington Works

This Town by Mark Leibovich

In theory, Mark Leibovich’s report from glittering post-recession Washington could have been a you’ll-never-eat-lunch-in-this-town-again moment for the writer. After all, his book—a combination of reporting, anthropology, and comic slicing and dicing—skewered people by name, hitting everything from how they threw parties to how they made money to how they mourned. But what would be the fun in that? If there’s anything Leibovich’s insidery depictions of status-seeking and celebrification taught, it’s that a guy whose book became a meme would never go hungry in #thistown.

Six years later, though, the evisceration feels more like That Town, a dispatch from a zany foreign country. In other words, it has joined an illustrious list of books that absolutely nailed some aspect of how Washington works, only to find themselves overtaken by events. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (1972) delivered a searing portrait of Ivy League types whose prescriptions for Southeast Asia went unquestioned. Thanks in part to Vietnam, such CVs don’t go quite so unquestioned anymore. Hedrick Smith’s The Power Game (1988) shone a light on behind-the-scenes media advisers and their hidden arts. Thirty years on, those arts are no longer so hidden.

And Leibovich’s chummy old swamp full of oblivious partygoers? Uh . . . that’s so six years ago. Of course, none of that means there’s no utility to yesteryear’s how-it-works bestsellers. Journalism becomes history pretty fast—and this is awfully entertaining history. So if, say, you’re wondering how Hillary Clinton’s circle never saw it coming, you’d find worse places to turn.

—Michael Schaffer

How Washington Works: Five More

Literary Agents

Essential Genre: Spies Who Write

Unlike policy tomes, thrillers are supposed to be escapist. But there’s one realm in which wonky, how-Washington-works detail is key: spy fiction, a verisimilitude-obsessed local genre that can sometimes be as much about bureaucracy as geopolitics. Not surprisingly, it has seen veterans of Washington’s foreign-policy scene—espionage officials, political journalists—thrive. A sampling, in order of the authors’ insider cred:

Robert Baer was a CIA field operative working in some of the world’s nastiest places. He poured all that into Blow the House Down (2006), a haunting, too-ignored alternative history of 9/11. The storyline sprawls across the globe, but ultimately it’s all about Washington.

Jason Matthews’s turbocharged 2013 debut novel, Red Sparrow— the first of a trilogy—is informed by his 33 years as a CIA agent, much of that time in “denied areas.” Oddly, even sweetly, he eases off the accelerator at the end of each chapter with recipes, for everything from blinis to kebabs.

Charles McCarry, another ex-spy—who died this year—lived a full second career as a novelist. He is to the CIA what John le Carré has been to England’s MI6: its master tragedian. McCarry’s crown jewel, Tears of Autumn (1974), is more than a thriller. It’s a great American novel.

Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II had solid Washington chops—Knebel as a political columnist, Bailey as a newspaper bureau chief—and they put that experience to excellent use in 1962’s Seven Days in May, about a clash between the White House and the Pentagon. Could a coup really happen here? Why not?

Robert Littell’s The Company (2002) is epic in length (almost 900 pages), ambition (a bona fide thriller and a rollicking history of the CIA), and achievement: Despite its heft, The Company never loses steam. Littell clearly kept his eyes wide open during his 1960s stint as a Newsweek foreign correspondent.

—Howard Means

Memoir and Biography

Personal History by Katharine Graham

Don’t think you can skip reading Personal History because you’ve seen the movie The Post or read All the President’s Men. Graham is perhaps best known for presiding over her newsroom during Watergate as well as her courageous decision to publish the Pentagon Papers, but the events that put her at the helm of the Washington Post are just as dramatic. In addition to delivering on its promised historical sweep, this Pulitzer-winning memoir will leave you with new admiration for a vulnerable woman who had a remarkable gift for grace under pressure.

More than 20 years after first reading it, I vividly recall her complicated family life and her loneliness amid great privilege. The patrician publisher also provides a granular portrait of a city and a country in the midst of sweeping change. Graham came of age in an era when, despite her accomplishments, it was accepted that leadership of her family’s newspaper would be handed to her husband. But when the brilliant and deeply troubled Philip Graham committed suicide in 1963, she stepped into the male-dominated newsroom and steered the Post through tumultuous political times.

Graham writes of a city of long-gone department stores like Woodward & Lothrop, of neighborhoods restricted against blacks and Jews. She crosses paths with many of the 20th century’s most storied characters, including Einstein, JFK, and Capote.

Personal History is a love letter to a newspaper and a reminder of the intention that a paper must be a public trust.

—Susan Coll

Memoir and Biography: Five More

Hometown Washington

Dream City by Harry S. Jaffe and Tom Sherwood

In 1995, David Carr hired me at Washington City Paper. I was from Utah and didn’t know much about local politics, so he insisted I read Dream City. The book was published in 1994, just before “mayor for life” Marion Barry was elected to a fourth term, despite serving six months in jail after being caught in a drug sting. Carr saw Barry’s comeback as alt-weekly gold, but to tell the stories that would come, his reporters needed to understand how Barry got there. Dream City helped me make sense of the complicated politician whose influence can still be felt.

Media coverage at the time treated Barry as a late-night joke, but Jaffe and Sherwood refused to draw a caricature. They told of a militant civil-rights warrior, called a “bama” and a “cotton-pickin’ n-gger” by the black bourgeoisie, even as he helped make many of them rich with city jobs and lucrative sole-source contracts to provide substandard human services to poor residents. The authors also knew the real beneficiaries of Barry’s corruption were white real-estate developers who got favorable treatment by the city in exchange for campaign contributions that helped keep Barry in office long after he’d run it into the ground.

Barry died almost penniless, but his legacy lives on in the city’s dismal human services and homeless shelters. Notorious places featured in the book— such as the Pitts Motor Hotel, where he funneled millions in taxpayer dollars to a crony to house homeless families in horrible conditions—are now luxury condos. But ultimately, Dream City was bigger than Barry, which is why it remains relevant. It’s the story of a majority–African American city’s long struggle to free itself from white congressional overlords and create a functioning democracy, warts and all.

—Stephanie Mencimer

Hometown Washington: Five More

Illustrations by Jenny Rosenberg 

This article appears in the November 2019 issue of Washingtonian.