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"We're wrapping up a presidency led me a man his own team has described as 'not a big reader.'"

And we're reading a post by a blogger ? Steve Benen ? who is not a big proof-reader.

Let's put aside the issue of whether George Bush is a big reader or not. (Karl Rove says he is. Richard Clarke said he's not.) I'd like to talk about the front-page NYT article that Benen links to, about what a different kind of reader Barack Obama is. Michiko Kakutani writes:

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading ? ruminating upon writers? ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove.... or passionately embrace an author?s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books ? Natan Sharansky?s ?Case for Democracy,? which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen?s ?Supreme Command,? which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr?s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What?s more, Mr. Obama?s love of fiction and poetry ? Shakespeare?s plays, Herman Melville?s ?Moby-Dick? and Marilynne Robinson?s ?Gilead? are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln?s collected writings and Emerson?s ?Self Reliance? ? has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Is reading to pick out the parts that fit your pre-existing vision more impressive than reading to grasp the author's vision? And, more importantly, since her writing oozes with preference for Barack Obama, why should we believe Kakutani's representation that Bush's books are ideological and Obama's are not?

Finally, there's this notion that fiction reading is what really develops your mind, which, I've long suspected is a pet belief of fiction readers. Immersed in their stories, they imagine ? they're so imaginative ? that they are better than people who read history and biography and so forth. In any case, Bush did read novels ? notably "The Stranger."

But Bush just can't get credit for anything these days, can he?

Full post as published by Althouse on January 19, 2009 (boomark / email).