Will the real bookworm please stand up?

Last updated on: May 6, 2015 at 10:03 am by Jane the Actuary

Will the real bookworm please stand up? 2015-05-06T10:03:06-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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The Federalist had an interesting piece yesterday, “Media Say Obama Is A ‘Bookworm.’ Are They Sure?” which didn’t cover any particularly new ground, but covered the old ground interestingly-enough: the media fawns over Obama’s supposed intellectual prowess, while at the same time deriding George W. Bush, and labeling claims that he reads, and reads a lot, as a pack of lies, where, in truth, W has made so many references to books he’s read and their content in so many situations that the accusation that he and his supporters are fibbing doesn’t hold water.

The context behind the article: a Washington Post report on the president’s visit to a library where he spoke to students and listed his favorite books — most of which don’t seem like particularly authentic “favorite books.” He claims to have read the whole of the Harry Potter series to his kids, from age 5 to age 13. Really? We’re to believe that at age 13, he still read to them? He lists the Hardy Boys, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Great Gatsby, and Of Mice and Men? The last of these has been assigned to every American 9th grader since time immemorial, but these really sound like a set of “favorite books” chosen by an advisor for their poll-tested-ness. On the other hand, maybe these were the honest selections of a fairly non-reader-y kid, if all your friends tell you that you have to read The Great Gatsby because it’s sooo profound, and the LOTR and a few books from the Karl May Westerns were the books my husband had from his school years, and about all he’d read then, anyway, so there’s that. (The Post sees particular intellectual prowess in reading the LOTR books rather than watching the movies, seemingly forgetting that these are supposed to be books from his childhood/teen years.)

And, Politico, too, as again linked to by The Federalist, says,

Obama is known as a bookworm, and he has famously taken his daughters to buy gifts at two of Washington ’s most famous independent bookstores — Kramerbooks and Politics and Prose. During each visit, his purchases were recorded in news reports.

Which, again, The Federalist identifies as more of a political stunt than anything else.

Obama, of course, has a list of books that he trots out and identifies as his “favorites”:

Previously, Obama named his favorite books as “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison. On his Facebook page, the president listed these two, in addition to Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Shakespeare’s tragedies, Taylor Branch’s “Parting the Waters” (a nonfiction work about Martin Luther King Jr.), “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson, Lincoln’s collected writings and the Bible.

Now, there may indeed have been books that Obama enjoyed, especially in his college years, when he reports having been quite busy with the project of discovering his Identity — and college is a time when, depending on the social circle you fall into, you can end up with the notion that reading the Right Books is how you define yourself. But I am skeptical that his reading now is of the sort that defines him as a Bookworm. Bookworms stay up late at night because they just can’t set the book down. Obama stays up late watching sports on TV.

Of course, having said this, I should acknowledge that, not long ago, I voiced skepticism of the adulation of The Bookworm. You and I can both name people who are successful without reading books as a hobby — and not just financially successful but intellectually curious as well. I’m just as fed up as the next one about politicians’ reflexive lying, but when it’s a requirement that they provide a long list of crucially-formative books, well, what can you do?

So, final thought:

If you were in Obama’s shoes, and had to list Favorite Books that you knew would be picked over as signalling one thing or another, what would they be? And what (if any) are your actual favorite books? Because, as for me, I’d be hard-pressed if I had to list specific books rather than genres.

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