Daily Loaf

William McKeen is chairman of the University of Florida’s Department of Journalism and author of several books, including the Hunter S. Thompson biography Outlaw Journalist.

Election Day and our thoughts turn naturally to books.

Here’s a strange-but-true fact: When he was president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt read a book a day. He wouldn’t allow himself to sleep at night until he had finished the tome du jour.

Pretty darn impressive. Makes you wonder how many other presidents were such dedicated readers. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

OK, from elections to erections . . .  of one sort or another

THE GREATS OF ROTH: When did they start making Cialis for the brain? There must be some breakthrough that helps old guys keep it up mentally.

How else to explain the continuing brilliance of Philip Roth, who must be at least 900 years old? Shouldn’t he be sitting on some St. Pete park bench talking baseball and bowels? Instead, he’s churning out Big Time Lit.

Seems this guy didn’t even begin to hit his stride until he made retirement age. Look at his work the last 15 years (12 books and counting!) and you see not only some of his greatest writing, but also some of the finest books from an American novelist since that whole Declaration of Independence thing went down.

Roth has been publishing for a half-century now. Though he rose to fame with Goodbye Columbus (in the 1950s) and Portnoy’s Complaint (in the 1960s), seems that Roth was just warming up with those two classic (and sex-obsessed) books.

The Ghost Writer (1979) came out at a time when you might expect him to step into his slippers and shuffle off to literary nighty night. He’d put in a good 20 years by then, and so he had earned a peaceful retirement. But that magnificent book was his way of telling us (in Bob Dylan’s words), “Stick with me – things should start to get interesting right about now.”

Not everything Roth has published since Ghost Writer has been choice, quality stuff. But the occasional misfires are expected when you take the sort of risks he’s taken. But if I start ticking off all of the fine books he’s done in his AARP years, I’ll soon run out of fingers.

He’s the only living American writer to get the balls-to-the-wall complete-works treatment in the prestigious Library of America. He’s won so many awards, he’s started using them for doorstops. And rarely does a year pass without something grand. Look back on the last decade, with American Pastoral,  The Human Stain and The Plot Against America.

Here comes Indignation (Houghton Mifflin, $26), his 29^th book overall.  Roth works in cycles and so he has  nine novels about Nathan Zuckerman, three novels about David Kepesh and three novels about “Philip Roth” – who may or may not be the author.

Indignation is a stand-alone book, in which the narrator – as always, a character somewhat superficially like Roth – is sent into Midwestern exile by his father. Marcus Messner, the protagonist, leaves Newark behind for the plains of Ohio – a college in Winesburg, Ohio. That’s right, good old Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Just the premise makes you want to tap-dance naked. Opening the book, you think, “This is going to be fun.”

Roth does not disappoint.

TALKING AND SIGNING:  Tampa native  Lionel (who says he needs only “one name, like God”) is coming  home to promote his book Everyone’s Crazy Except You and Me and I’m Not So Sure About You (Hyperion, $22.95). He’ll be at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Ave., for a reading and signing at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 15.

His real name is Michael Lebron and he’s a Stetson University law school grad and Air America host. During his lawyer days, he was on both sides of the aisle as prosecutor, then defense attorney. He’s been doing talk radio for 20 years and calls himself “America’s Favorite Contrarian.”

Jeff Klinkenberg, the man with the best job in Florida (”Have radials, will travel”) will talk about his latest book, Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators (University Press of Florida, $24.95), Saturday at  Brooker Creek Preserve Education Center, 3940 Keystone Road, Tarpon Springs.

Klinkenberg writes his on-the-road accounts of life in what he calls “The Real Florida” for the St. Petersburg Times. The jumping-off place for his talk is “Floridians in the Age of Dinosaurs,” but it will no doubt be supplemented by stories from his latest collection. His talk will be followed by a book singing.

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