Slate: Barack's Book Bag (Obama's summer reading list v George W. Bush's)

[marmar]

Barack's Book Bag
What Obama's summer reading list says about him.

By John Dickerson

Posted Monday, Aug. 24, 2009, at 8:09 PM ET


All vacations have their rituals: slapping sunscreen on wriggling kids, eating ice cream after dinner, and hiding the holes in the rental-house drywall. Presidential vacations have rituals, too: peekaboo with the press corps, highly managed casual social engagements, and golf. Always there must be the golf.

Even the news media have their vacation rituals. One of them is overinterpreting the presidential summer reading list. Monday the White House obliged, offering the list of five books president Obama has packed for his trip:

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

What does this list of American authors tell us about the president? Well, it's not as fun as the year Bush decided to read Camus' The Stranger. George Bush reading a French Existentialist is like Obama reading a Cabela's catalog. Plus, it was a story about a one-time layabout turned unrepentant Arab killer, which, if you wanted to overinterpret things, gave you enough material to get you through a few packs of Gauloises. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.slate.com/id/2226142?yahoo=y

[tanyev]

1. Obama's book list reflects someone who picked books he actually wanted to read.

Bush's book picks looked like something a PR hack wanted us to think George Bush would read. We know better.

[Spazito]

2. That's my take on the picks as well...

The difference between someone who has no need to put up a pretense versus one who is nothing but pretense.

[EFerrari]

5. Also tells you he likes to read. Readers always take too many books

on vacation. :)

[mitchum]

3. Price's Lush Life is much better than his last few novels...

but it is still not a return to his earlier genius form.
Pelecanos is a baaaaaad influence on Price's work.

[Dramarama]

4. We all know he really has

Harry Potter in his bag