Flies should choose their walls carefully. That’s my main takeaway from reading 20 Bob Woodward books in the past four weeks. No one can beat Woodward at getting the story of the White House from the inside, from the perspective of the decision makers as they saw themselves. People tell Woodward things they shouldn’t, from the alarming (Trump aides swiping memos from his desk) to the mundane (Nixon trying to gnaw open a childproof cap on a pill bottle with his teeth). He may be the sole practitioner of a form that occupies a space between journalism and history, one that tries to balance immediacy with detail. When he’s onto a good story—the resignation of a president, Iran-Contra, America’s post-9/11 wars—there’s no one better, or at least no one better who’s faster.

I began reading and ranking every freaking Woodward book—all of 20 of them; that’s almost 10,000 pages—when Fear, the new book about President Donald Trump, was announced last month. I read four on vacation in mid-August, then four more the next week, and then five more, and seven more. I learned a lot, even as I learned that not all palace intrigue is intriguing.

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Why did I do it? Was it to uncover how the presidency has changed since Watergate? To prove that I could? So that you wouldn’t have to? All of the above. Still, I wouldn’t do it again, and neither should anybody else.

Politico Magazine acquired a copy of Fear this week, and I’ve read it. So here we go:

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20. The Man Who Would Be President

It’s not quite accurate to say that I read this book, though I did turn every page. Co-written by David Broder, it’s a collection of articles, first published in The Washington Post during the buildup to the 1992 campaign, about Vice President Dan Quayle. Either Woodward or his publicist has banished the book from his website, which contains a lengthy description—and purchase button—for every other title that put his name on a dust jacket. Eighteen—soon to be 19—books, it says, and 12 No.1 bestsellers! But what about No. 20?

Some Woodward acolytes argue that The Man Who Would Be President isn’t a book, because it was conceived and published as a newspaper series. You know, I’m looking at it right now, and it’s a book. It has pages and everything. Chapter 6 is titled, “The Vice President’s Driving Passion: Quayle Unleashes Competitive Energy on the Golf Course.” Woodward delights in uncovering details that presidents and senior administration figures have scrubbed from their official histories and omitted from their memoirs. Sorry, Bob. I found your smoking gun.

19. The Price of Politics

Ever since State of Denial, his third book about the George W. Bush administration, Woodward has fashioned himself as much an analyst of the presidency as a just-the-facts conduit of White House secrets, gossip and intrigue. The Price of Politics cements this ascension from Washington Post cops reporter to D.C. eminence by opening with a first-person anecdote from the Gridiron Club dinner, one that condemns Barack Obama, then a newly elected senator from Illinois, as an inexperienced narcissist.

Alas, then Woodward recedes from the story, a deadeningly thorough chronicle of the debt-ceiling negotiations between Barack Obama and John Boehner. Would I have been kinder to this book if it hadn’t been the 18th Bob Woodward book I read in the past four weeks? Maybe! But Michiko Kakutani called The Price of Politics “often tedious” when she reviewed it for the New York Times. Writing in the home turf of Woodward’s Washington Post, Jeff Shesol concurred, “If the hallmark of a Bob Woodward book is that it puts you in the room, you may well, before long, start clawing for the exits.”

Or, as Woodward writes in the final paragraph, “There was so much effort, most of it sincere, but so little result.” He means the budget negotiations. I think.

18. Obama’s Wars

It could be that No-Drama Obama just made for low-drama Woodward. There’s little that Woodward appears to enjoy more than quoting some presidential cursing, but no matter how impatient Obama gets with his generals in this account of his Afghanistan policy, POTUS stays PG-rated. “I’m pissed” is as profane as it gets, but even then “he didn’t raise his voice much.” (In The Price of Politics, Obama does tell some Democrats, “Stop this bullshit,” but still, Woodward says the president was only “close to losing his temper.”) At another moment, the best a frustrated Obama can muster is, “This presentation strains credulity.”

In both books, Obama is damaged by his distaste for politics and his newness to Washington. When Obama chooses Jim Jones as his national security adviser, Woodward writes, “He seemed to have reached the baffling conclusion that the lack of a personal relationship could be an asset.” John Podesta was “not sure,” Woodward adds, “that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut.” Instead, the president “intellectualized … essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas.”

Best anecdote: Richard Holbrooke, the newly appointed special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, invites the Pakistani ambassador to lunch at the Hay-Adams Hotel. Holbrooke insists on a public location “so it gets reported in the newspaper.” No one notices.

17. Plan of Attack

When the first Iraq war ended in 1991, there was a lot of talk about the end of America’s lingering “Vietnam syndrome.” By the time the second Iraq war began a decade later, Vietnam syndrome had been replaced by Gulf War syndrome, a national assumption that war could be brief, sterile and free of sacrifice. Plan of Attack is Woodward’s first, and definitely not last (he wrote four Bush at War books, amounting to more than 2,000 pages in eight years) stab at explaining what happened next.

It was heralded as Woodward’s comeback when it was published, but to my eye it’s the least of his four George W. Bush books. Plan of Attack is all war planning, but very little war, and it lacks the novelistic intimacy of Woodward’s best work. The tidbits that got Washington tittering 14 years ago (Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn rule,” George Tenet’s “slam dunk,” Bush’s invocation of a “higher Father” than his dad) remain, and Plan of Attack is an important document of how and why the United States invaded with too few troops to win the peace (see: Donald Rumsfeld). But the characters in that drama are more vividly painted in Bush at War, and the consequences aren’t fully revealed until State of Denial and The War Within, which in many ways feel like Woodward’s attempts at a Plan of Attack do-over.

Underappreciated anecdote: The CIA floods Kurdistan with so many Benjamins to pay its sources that everything, “even a cup of coffee,” starts to cost $100.

16. Maestro

Like Plan of Attack, Woodward’s story of how Alan Greenspan helped create the prosperity of the 1990s feels like half a book. Unlike Plan of Attack, we never get the sequel, or the revision. There’s little about the asset bubbles—in stocks and in housing—whose bursting would define the next decade of economic policymaking, other than Greenspan’s uncertainty as to whether there’s anything he can safely do about them. This book, in short, could use some Ben Bernanke. (Janet Yellen, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors from 1994 to 1997, does pop up now and again to fret that Greenspan isn’t putting on the brakes.) Still, we get an inside account of Greenspan’s Fed and its decision-making, not to mention his mastery of Washington schmoozing.

Memorable anecdote: When Greenspan asked Andrea Mitchell to marry him, his proposal was so opaque that “either she had not understood what he was saying or it had failed to register”—on two different occasions.

15. The Brethren

Woodward’s first book after The Final Days, co-written with Scott Armstrong, begins as SCOTUS for Dummies: “The United States Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, is the final forum for appeal in the American judiciary.” While Woodward and Armstrong’s infiltration of the cloistered realm of justices and their clerks is impressive, the result reads like a collection of chronological anecdotes from the Burger Court, with little attempt to weigh their importance or meaning. Even so, anyone who thinks the Supreme Court wasn’t political in the 1970s will have their illusions dashed by reading about the vote-trading and logrolling in this book. And the deliberations over the Nixon tapes are like the second half of the political Law & Order episode that began in All the President’s Men.

Woodward and Armstrong also gleefully track the Court’s struggles to define obscenity (“no erections and no insertions,” Byron White concludes at one point, and William Brennan’s clerks also apply what they call a “limp dick” standard: “Oral sex was tolerable if there was no erection”). The “humorous high point of most terms” was “movie day,” when justices and clerks watch the pornos under consideration in obscenity appeals.

Possibly the most current sentences in the book: “It was only recently that activism on the Court had become ‘liberal’ activism, Rehnquist reminded them. Only forty years before, the Court’s activists were conservatives. The balance was once again shifting back, Rehnquist said. Once it had, liberals would be the ones calling for judicial restraint and chiding the conservatives for ignoring precedent.”

14. Fear

Donald Trump makes for pretty good copy, even if Woodward hasn’t turned up all that much—or at least all that much beyond the book’s jaw-dropping prologue, in which Gary Cohn lifts a document (an order to withdraw from a trade agreement with South Korea that Trump was about to sign) from the president’s desk. The theme, beyond Trump’s ignorance and dishonesty, is that the deep state is real: An “administrative coup d’état” has been carried out by Trump’s Cabinet and staff to contradict the president’s constitutional authority. For instance, when Trump tells James Mattis, “Let’s go in; let’s kill the fucking lot of them” after a Syrian chemical attack, Mattis hangs up and tells an aide, “We’re not going to do any of that.”

It’s also just super dishy. Trump says H.R. McMaster dresses like a “beer salesman.” Jared Kushner tells Steve Bannon of his father-in-law, “He doesn’t have a lot of cash.” Trump asks Kellyanne Conway, before offering her the job as his campaign manager, “Are you willing to not see your kids for a few months?” We go deep inside the Rex Tillerson “fucking moron” meeting at the Pentagon. An image of Trump’s handwriting—the words “TRADE IS BAD” on a speech he’s revising—is reproduced.

At the same time, you can tell that this one was put together on deadline. Woodward’s books are often most interesting when he inserts himself as a character and reveals his reportorial decision-making and the Post’s newsroom deliberations alongside the White House dope. In Fear, those moments of journalistic drama are replaced with moments in which Woodward reveals observations he made during his appearances on Fox News Sunday.

13. The Agenda

When I first read this book almost 25 years ago, I loved it. Clinton’s purple rages! Long-term interest rates! A surprise cameo by Atul Gawande!

OK, I only noticed the Gawande cameo upon rereading it. We’ve got all the materials here for a great Woodward book—characters who are still historically important, and in ways (like Hillary Clinton) that weren’t fully grasped at the time. But while the passage of Clinton’s deficit-reduction plan in his first year in office was undeniably important, from the perspective of 2018 it feels like an odd choice for a book about Bill Clinton (not that Woodward could have known that in 1994). Also, there’s way too much David Boren.

Still, The Agenda begins with a strikingly intimate scene, with Hillary and Bill Clinton seemingly in bed on an Arkansas morning in 1991, discussing why now is the time for Bill to run for the presidency. He describes James Carville nicely (“a bald, pointy head and riveting, almost sinister eyes”). There’s Quality Cursing (Bill Clinton: “You mean to tell me that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”). The climax is striking, as Warren Buffett calls Bob Kerrey, the Democratic senator from Nebraska, to recommend that he vote for Clinton’s deficit-reduction plan.

From a post-presidential viewpoint, here’s the most memorable quote in The Agenda: “If I don’t get health care done,” Clinton says, “I’ll wish I didn’t run for president.”

12. The Commanders

This Bush at War prequel feels like the first time Woodward settled on the form he describes as “somewhere between newspaper journalism and history.” He set out to write a book about the Pentagon, presumably one that would resemble Veil, his book about the Central Intelligence Agency. The invasions of Panama and Iraq changed his approach, and his deadline. The main characters are Dick Cheney, then the defense secretary, and Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the knowledge that the two men will be linked again in 20 years adds to the story’s salience.

“This book is not about most of the things the military does,” Woodward writes of his method. “It is not about weapons procurement, defense budget fights, recruiting, training or military field exercises. With a few brief exceptions, it does not touch on the way the military has actually fought the wars of the last few years. It will not take you into the helicopters descending on Panama City, or to the desert tank battles in Iraq and Kuwait. It is above all a book about how the United States decides to fight its wars before shots are fired. The main setting is Washington, and the main action is the tug-and-pull among the players in the military decision-making process, both inside and outside the Pentagon.”

11. The Last of the President’s Men

A memoir of Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who disclosed the existence of the president’s Oval Office taping system to the Senate Watergate Committee, this book is most notable for documenting what a weirdo Nixon was.

It also includes Woodward’s favorite Nixon White House anecdote, which appears in multiple books: Staff assistants in the Nixon White House were called “Higbys,” after Larry Higby, chief of staff H.R. Haldeman’s executive assistant. Eventually, Higby gets his own Higby, who becomes known as “Higby’s Higby.”

Butterfield is essentially hired as “Haldeman’s Haldeman,” but spends his early days hiding from Nixon, who is so introverted he won’t look at or speak to Butterfield for days. “If the president comes in, you just walk out,” Haldeman tells Butterfield. “It’ll spook him if he sees you.”

In an echo of a moment in All the President’s Men, Woodward calls Henry Kissinger at one point to talk about a Nixon memo acknowledging years of bombing “failure” in Southeast Asia. “That is true,” Kissinger says, before adding, “Now, you’re not going to quote me on this, are you?”

Woodward writes, “Yes, I said I would.”

10. Wired

A book about comedy, drugs and rock ’n’ roll by an author who seems to understand none of them. Three decades later, Woodward’s idea of an au courant pop-culture reference is still Dynasty (in Fear) or Columbo (in The War Within). Woodward now describes Wired as a book about “the Hollywood drug culture,” and that’s probably a more accurate description of it than a biography of John Belushi, even if Belushi’s life is the window into that culture. A reader of Wired might wonder if Belushi was ever funny or charming, or why people kept hiring him—at Second City, on Saturday Night Live, for movies like Animal House and The Blue Brothers—if he was so unreliable and unpleasant to work with. You start to understand why, say, Nixon’s admirers resent the attention paid to Watergate at the exclusion of all else. But as a chronicle of one man’s addiction, with lots of bold-faced names—Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro are in the story of the night of Belushi’s death—this is quite a read.

9. The War Within

The fourth Bush at War book could use more Dick Cheney. And like Shakespeare, Woodward’s tragedies tend to be better than the comedies. This one doesn’t end with a marriage, but it’s the best good-news Woodward book, the story of how David Petraeus and George W. Bush salvaged the Iraq war with the “surge” from 2006 to 2008.

Yet Woodward also uses this book to meditate on why the war went so wrong for so long. “The president and his team had become marketers of Bush’s certainty,” he writes. Rumsfeld sits in his office “trying to control the world through his snowflakes,” his short and constant Pentagon memos. Rummy seems to think that war is like welfare, that too much American security will “create a dependency among the Iraqis.” Colin Powell unloads for 20 minutes on the Iraq Study Group about the war-planning mistakes of Gen. Tommy Franks.

Woodward writes, with unusual directness, “I have never doubted the sincerity of the president’s convictions. But convictions alone are not enough.” He concludes that Bush spent “three years in denial” about the Iraq war, that he was “intolerant” of confrontation and debate, and that he “engaged in the war rhetorically but maintained an odd detachment from its management.”

8. The Secret Man

This is minor Woodward, but it’s incredibly enjoyable. Much of the first half reads like the footnotes to All the President’s Men. But it’s also the closest thing Woodward has written to a memoir, beginning with his first meeting with Mark Felt in the White House when Woodward was a Navy lieutenant. He discloses when he broke the rules of his agreement with Felt, including when he described him as “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men. He admits to lying to a Post colleague, Richard Cohen, to wave him off the scent when Cohen was about to publish a column nailing Felt as Woodward’s source. It’s probably the best window we have into who Woodward is as a person and how he thinks. Plus, Nixon seems extra-weird—if not quite as weird as in The Last of the President’s Men—and Woodward quotes Kant.

7. Shadow

Richard Nixon is the Kilgore Trout of the Woodward literary corpus, a recurring character who just keeps showing up. In Shadow, Woodward looks at how Watergate—especially special prosecutors and independent counsels—affected the five presidents after Nixon, from Ford to Clinton. The Watergate metaphor is strained at times, and Woodward underplays the legacy of Gary Hart in the presidency of Bill Clinton, but there are lots of good stories here, including the time Jimmy Carter lied to Woodward and Ben Bradlee, and a powerfully sad post-presidential deposition of Ronald Reagan, who can’t remember anything and says, “It’s like I wasn’t president at all.”

6. State of Denial

A merciless recounting of the postwar planning—and lack thereof—undertaken by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, as well as a fuller chronicle of George W. Bush’s rise and fall. The four Bush at War books repeat some material, even sentences and what feel like paragraphs. You get the feeling that just as the administration kept trying to get the war right, Woodward kept returning to the story, trying to get a fuller, more complete picture. In the end, he wrote three books just on Iraq—Plan of Attack, State of Denial, and The War Within. This is the story’s second act, when everything looks as bad as it will ever get. It’s The Empire Strikes Back of Woodward’s Iraq trilogy.

5. The Choice

Disclosure: I’m from Kansas. The pleasure of recognition I get when Bob Dole says “Jiminy” (my dad would say “Jiminy Cricket”), or when he uses “visit” as a verb that means “sit and talk,” may lead you not to trust me on the merits of The Choice. This is the book, after all, that inspired Joan Didion to fillet Woodward in the New York Review of Books as a writer of “political pornography,” of “books in which memorable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”

If The Choice is pornography, all right then I’ll go to hell. If this book were written by Michael Lewis or Mark Leibovich, it would be regarded as a campaign classic. Hillary Clinton communes with Eleanor Roosevelt in the White House, and Bob Dole spends so much time talking to Woodward that even Woodward runs out of questions. Joe Lieberman (!) describes the arrival of Dick Morris in the White House as an “act of God” that will save the Democratic Party. And the cast includes not just Clinton and Dole but important later figures like Cheney, Powell and Hillary Clinton. George Will comes across as the George Conway of the 1990s, writing a column titled “Good Man … Wrong Job?” about Dole, the candidate for whom his wife, Mari, works as an adviser and speechwriter.

You should know there’s basically nothing about Ken Starr or Whitewater. You have to read Shadow for that. The only time the word “blowjob” appears in a book that covers the period when Bill Clinton met an intern in the Oval Office is when Scott Reed, Dole’s campaign manager, complains about Colin Powell getting “blowjob interviews” from the press.

4. Veil

Like The Brethren, Veil is very disconnected, bouncing from Nicaragua to Lebanon to Russia to Libya, but it’s tied together by the person of Ronald Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey, and the backdrop of Iran-Contra—as well as the reader’s knowledge that 9/11 is coming, which recontextualizes many of the events in the Middle East. As with All the President’s Men, Woodward is a character in the drama, and Ben Bradlee shows up, too, as the two journalists clash with Casey on what should be reported and when.

When this book came out, some were skeptical that Woodward actually snuck into Casey’s hospital bed for a final interview—a near-deathbed confession that pays off much better than the interview he seeks with a dying Mark Felt, who suffers from dementia, in The Secret Man. I’ve read too much Woodward by now to be skeptical. Like Casey, “I believed.”

3. Bush at War

My recollection of the reception of this book about the first 100 days after 9/11—a reputation that Woodward gets modestly defensive about in The War Within—is that it was a puff piece. But reading it now, George W. Bush comes off as the same president he is in the sequels: resolute but impatient and uninformed, with an administration riven by a conflict between Powell and Rumsfeld, who begins agitating for war with Iraq from the very start. This is my vote for “the best since The Final Days,” a riveting, novelistic account of a crucial moment in history. Is it the whole story? Of course not. It is, as Woodward concedes, “an inside account, largely the story as the insiders saw it, heard it and lived it.” Still, needs more Cheney.

2. The Final Days

There’s a reason reviewers so often seem to be proclaiming that the latest Woodward book is “his best since The Final Days.” This book, the second of the two that were co-written by Carl Bernstein, is fantastic, the model for all that came after. Also, it helps that it’s about the only president to resign. As we said at the outset, if you’re going to be a fly, it helps to have a good wall.

Plus, the ending now reads like a post-credits scene for the beginning of the rest of the Woodward cinematic universe, as newly minted President Gerald Ford writes one word on a memo, recommending his new chief of staff: “Rumsfeld.”

1. All the President’s Men

It opens like a thriller, with burglars in a courtroom—one of whom soon discloses that he works for the CIA. All the President’s Men is a true crime story and also a newsroom drama, and the knowledge that Mark Felt was Deep Throat makes the book more interesting, not less, as it makes it easier to weigh Felt’s knowledge and his motivations. The elimination of what used to be the book’s central mystery also shifts the reader’s focus from Who Is Deep Throat? to Holy Cow, Two Metro Reporters Are Taking Down a President. The first, and still the best. This one I’d read again.