NY Times bookblogger Dwight Garner picks up on George W. Bush’s cue from an interview last week, as the president explains, “I seriously don’t watch TV. You know, I watch sports, but I’d much rather read books. And I do. I read a lot.” Garner wonders, “We know what Barack Obama has been reading lately. Do we know what’s been on Bush’s reading list?”
Well, we may not have the most recent updates, but in the summer of 2006, U.S. News & World Report published a lengthy presidential reading list that famously (and to the delight of W-mockers worldwide) included Camus’s The Stranger, along with biographies of Mao, Abraham Lincoln, Robert Oppenheimer, Roberto Clemente, and Babe Ruth, plus Geraldine Brooks‘s Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women. If I had to make a guess, from the current NYT hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, I’d expect him to be reading Patrick Buchanan‘s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War or Mark Bowden‘s The Best Game Ever, but it’d be awfully nice to think he might be reading Ori and Rom Brafman‘s Sway, all about “the deep-seated forces that influence behavior and cause people to make irrational choices.”