What does Bush read?
Some people might prefer to rephrase the question as “Does Bush read?” and regard it as rhetorical.
Lately I have been increasing the time I spend reading. I have been reading Chekhov, Proust, Breiðfjörð :), Einar Ben and plenty more … and all of these I chose simply because I had heard that they were worth my time, from people I trusted with that judgment. The choice of what to spend your time reading is a nontrivial one: we have a disastrously short time on this earth, and the number of books we can possibly read in our lifetimes is alarmingly minuscule compared to the number of books worth reading.
So here is an interesting project: Who Reads What? All kinds of well-known people (politicians, actors, writers, musicians) are asked for recommended reading, and their replies are published along with brief comments. What does Nelson Mandela recommend? How about John Kenneth Galbraith?
Sure, there are plenty of people recommending things like Tom Clancy novels, but there are interesting entries as well.
Yes, George W. Bush does have an entry in there … as “the governor of Texas.” It is from 1999, possibly before it was clear that he would run for president, so his answer is at least less likely to be written by a crack team of psychologists specializing in electoral profiling or PR, than if he were asked a year later or any time since.
There is a new list of dozens of people each year, and it’s been going since 1988, so there is a fair number of entries by now. This is an interesting collection to browse through, not only as a tiny peephole into the minds of well-known people, but also as input from people you respect into your own process of deciding how to spend your ridiculously small amount of reading time in the vast world of stuff to read.