60 Books!

The White House claims that President Bush has entered a reading contest with Karl Rove and that W. has read 60 books so far this year. 60 books! Wow that is one of the worst lies they have come up with in his entire tenure, and there is a lot of competition.

I consider myself a fairly avid rader and have read maybe 12 books so far this year.

According to Dan Froomkin's math:

Of the twelve books listed, I come up with a total page count of 5,356 pages, including 1,585 pages not available until at least 4/2006 of this year. That is an average page count of 450 pages per book. Multiply by his 60 books so far this year for a total page count of 27,000. 27,000 pages means the President would have to average a little over 115 pages per day. Reading a quick pace of a little over a minute per page, that is two hours a day of reading, and let's be honest, longer if you want to retain information in these types of books. And this from a man who prides himself in not reading the paper. I don't buy it.

I find this too incredible to believe. And when the Carpetbagger puts Bush's summer days in context it becomes evn more incredible.

And those are just the 12 books Walsh listed. The White House press office gave C-SPAN a list of 25 books — which were just part of the president's summer reading list. For a guy who likes to get to bed early, who devotes a couple of hours a day to exercise, and who ostensibly oversees the executive branch of government during a war, let's just say this is more than a little "ambitious."

Even if we assume that this is all transparent White House spin, and that the president didn't read "The Stranger" or much else from his reading list, the question then becomes, why bother with this narrative anyway?

USNWR's Walsh wrote that "portraying Bush as a voracious reader is part of an ongoing White House campaign to restore what a senior adviser calls 'gravitas' to the Bush persona. He certainly needs something."

We started a book club the this month and are looking at averaging 100-150 a week. Modest, but a good ammount for busy people. And I hope that our president is busier than I am. If he really did take the time to read this much though, maybe it would explain why our foreign policy and economy is falling apart. It's hard to figure out a new game plan for our war in Iraq otherthan "stay the course" when you are nose deep in Hamlet and MacBeth everyday.