What A Real President Reads; of course, the cowboy who calls himself President is proud that he doesn't read, so it isn't a fair comparison. But then Dubya comes up 7 days late and 7 bucks short in any comparison with William Jefferson Clinton.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Nov. 21 — Ah, nothing like curling up in front of the fireplace with 21 of President Clinton's favorite books.
To coincide with the opening of a Clinton Library-related exhibit of books and gifts he received while president, Clinton has released a list of his 21 favorite books from his wife's "Living History" to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" to Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ."
Clinton's presidential library is to open next November on the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. A nearby office building, the Cox Creative Center, has hosted a number of preview exhibits, and on Monday opens "America Presents: A Collection of Books and Gifts of the Clinton Presidency." The exhibit runs through Jan. 3.
Copies of Clinton's 21 favorite books will be on display at the Cox building.
Besides Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Ellison's soaring novel of a black man's journey through white America and Kempis' 15th-century treatise on Christian living, other books of note include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."
The entire list of Clinton's favorite books, listed alphabetically by author:
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou.
"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.
"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker.
"Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch.
"Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald.
"The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.
"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.
"The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
"The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney.
"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.
"The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis.
"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell.
"The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley.
"Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr.
"The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron.
"Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber.
"You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.
"Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright.
"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.
What? No "Blood Will Tell"? Or surely "The Boys Who Would Be Cubs"? I'm heartbroken. But I am excited to learn that our last elected president reads Thomas Wolfe and Bill Styron.
