This piece on fellow librarian Laura Bush's summer reading turned up in the Daily Tar Heel's Book section which they took from the Washington Post Book World. (And now I'm borrowing it, but always with attribution.) Last year, Mrs. Bush facetiously, "told the White House Correspondents Association dinner: "George and I were just meant to be ... I was the librarian who spent 12 hours a day in the library, yet somehow I met George." Her reading includes Ann Tyler and Alexandre McCall Smith, both gentle humorous observers of the human character.
Mr. Bush's summer reading last year included books that took the UK newspaper, the Guardian by surprise. According to the Guardian article, he lugged around the following titles: "Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky... The other tomes are reported to be Alexander II: the Last Great Tsar by Edvard Radzinsky and The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History by John M Barry."
I think this is the President's 2006 summer reading as provided by the White House Press office. It looks like he read a lot of history, hard-boiled detective stories (John D. MacDonald's Travis Magee series were terrific even though they have fallen out of popularity since MacDonald's death), a book about Fidel Castro, which makes sense of course, and another book on an epidemic, polio this year, last year it was the influenza of 1919.
It's always interesting to find out what other people are reading which is why Amazon has links to related titles based on people's purchasing habits.
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