Politico and Random House are partnering to try something new: They're publishing novella-length e-books about the 2012 presidential campaign as three-dollar e-books every few months. It's a smart idea—previously, if you wanted to write a book about presidential politics, you had to publish it waaaaay after the actual election, automatically relegating your book to retrospective status. Now there are already two 100-page e-books on the 2012 presidential campaign available to the public, written by Mike Allen and Evan Thomas: The Right Fights Back was published in late November of 2011 and Inside the Circus was published on Tuesday. (You can buy these books from any local bookseller that sells Google E-books.) They're basically crack for political junkies, full of gossip and insider accounts.

The first thing you have to do when you read these books is set aside your idea of what a political book should be. Even Game Change, which was rushed to publication after the 2008 campaign, feels like a dense, intricate Russian novel compared to these two e-books. They don't have much structure—they're basically shapeless accounts of the Republican campaign that run in more-or-less chronological order. And there are some serious continuity problems between the two books. In Fights, Mitt Romney's team is described as a serious, stripped-down organization led by an unflappable candidate who had learned his lessons in 2008. In Circus, Romney's team is portrayed as a somewhat incompetent force led by a paranoid, sometimes-angry candidate who is nearly paralyzed by the fear of committing a gaffe. While those two Romneys aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, an explanation of how the confident, seen-it-all Romney became so frightened and overcautious in such a short span of time would be welcome.

But many of the portrayals closely resemble the candidates we've been seeing for a year now. Rick Perry is even more bumbling than we suspected—Circus begins with an account of a medication-addled Perry serenading another campaign's manager with a loopy version of "I've Been Working on the Railroad" at a urinal just before a debate. Michele Bachmann seems genuinely flabbergasted by the attacks she suffered at the hands of the other candidates. Herman Cain is exactly as dumb as you think.

So long as you don't expect the books to function as a coherent narrative—there'll be plenty of time to condense the 2012 campaign into something resembling a story after the November election—these books are a treasure chest full of messy, anonymously sourced gossip about the clowns who have consumed all of our attention for the last few months. Like the political process itself, these books are misshapen, self-important, airy, and agenda-driven. Ain't it great?