In an era of censorship and blacklisting, President Trump may need help finding the right book to take with him to bed after an exhausting day. He hasn’t asked for my advice, but with the two of us sharing a common humanity and nearly the same age, I have prepared a modest list of books to take him places he doesn’t go in a normal day.

My choices need to meet three criteria: they must be novels, they must offer an objective truth about American culture, and they must not be books banned from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy.

We all know that a good book hooks us with something familiar and interesting, then takes us, willingly, into unfamiliar territory. The president is a busy man, so I’ll begin with what might catch his interest.

My first suggestion is “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest Gaines (1993). Up front I need to warn him that the author is Black, the narrator and characters too; but he will quickly see that although this is a story about a young man sentenced to death for merely being in a white-owned store when a crime was committed, racism and injustice are not the focus of the book. Instead, a conservative, Black lawyer is sent by his grandmother to the jail cell of the convicted man to teach him how to die with dignity.

Next, I would recommend “American Pastoral” by Philip Roth (1997). This is a long and complicated tale, but right off the bat there are points of correlation between the president and the main character, who is a businessman with a factory in Newark, a family enterprise passed down by his father. In a heroic sequence, this man hangs tough and keeps his factory lights on during the Newark riots of 1967.

If that isn’t enough to interest the president, he will also discover that long before the riots, this man moved his family out of the city, west into the peaceful hills of New Jersey, not far from where Trump, later in 2004, opened his Bedminster Golf Course.

Keeping in mind the President’s interest in colleges and universities, next I suggest Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” (2005). Humor will draw him into this book, a satire of the administrative hypocrisies of an elite college with a distinctly liberal bias. Even better, the foil for the woke madness is a visiting professor of art, a conservative Black man, who dresses like a robber baron.

And speaking of barons, if the president is put off by the fact that Zadie Smith is not only British, but biracial, he will overlook these details when he learns that she taught for many years at N.Y.U.

With immigration very much on the president’s mind, what better book is there to recommend than Chang Rae Lee’s “A Gesture Life” (1999)? Here he will meet a Japanese man who migrated in the years after World War II to upstate New York, where he became a model citizen and businessman by assimilating perfectly into American culture. He runs a medical supply store, and although he has no degree, his customers lovingly call him “Doc Hata.”

If there is time for a man as busy as our president to read five books in a single year, I would stretch my criteria a little and recommend “In the Time of the Butterflies” by Julia Alvarez (1994). The central story takes place in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era, but what will capture the President is Trajillo himself, a handsome strongman who, with plausible deniability, is able to silence a trio of outspoken women who disapprove of him as a leader.

Anyone who knows these books will see that my descriptions are skewed, though technically accurate. I want him to feel that he will be in his comfort zone and will meet characters he could imagine inviting to Mar-a-Lago.

Of course, this is all whimsy, because the president doesn’t read. I wish he did because books are where we discover what we don’t already know and, even better, discover that something we think we know is more complex and interesting than we ever dreamed.

I’ll suggest a few of the new ideas he might learn from these five books: an educated man might learn more about dignity from an illiterate boy than he could ever hope to teach him; it’s possible to feel compassion for a terrorist if the terrorist is your own flesh and blood; disobeying an order, being disloyal, can be the right thing to do, even in wartime; talking about race is the only way to really understand it; and finally, there are times when women are stronger than men.

There is no limit to what we can learn from books, and it’s never too late to start.

Jonathan Stableford is a retired educator. He lives in Strafford.