Tim brought my attention to this article about presidential candidates and their favorite books. This part in particular concerns my personal favorite novel:

Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey took the opposite approach, tackling the book question headfirst when he sought the 1992 Democratic nomination. Kerrey readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling. His answer may have revealed too much. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction." Ouch.

You can tell from that paragraph that The Moviegoer is my kind of book. Not only that, it is something I have quite a bit of emotional attachment to. So if Kerrey feels the same he must be a lot like me, and I would never, ever, let myself be president. The man shows poor judgement.

If I wasn't limited to novels, I would rather say The Tragic Sense of Life or, of course, The Trouble With Being Born. I would love to see what the press would do with that. (The negative customer review for the Cioran in that link is actually a pretty good description, though he seems to miss (some of) the point. "Unfixability", is, I think, an unfortunate choice of words for Cioran because it implies that something is broken. Cioran doesn't buy into the conservative myth that the "old times" were better. Nevertheless, "Nietzsche without the optimism" is a blurb Cioran would wholeheartedly endorse.