Obama's Summer Reading List

Well the White House released Obama's summer reading list. I was expecting more for some reason:

• The Way Home by George Pelecanos, a crime thriller based in Washington, D.C.;
• Lush Life by Richard Price, a story of race and class set in New York's Lower East Side;
• Tom Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded, on the benefits to America of an environmental revolution;
• John Adams by David McCullough;
• Plainsong by Kent Haruf, a drama about the life of eight different characters living in a Colorado prairie community.

So we have 2 crime thrillers, a preaching to the choir book about America leading the Green Revolution, a Presidential Biography, and a book about people living in small town Colorado. For some reason I was expecting something different than 4 fiction novels and a biography.

This is supposed to be President Spock the Intellectual so I was expecting some weighty tomes about obscure topics. Something that I would need to rush to Amazon just to see what these books were about.

Maybe an Indian poetry book written in the original Sanskrit or an obscure novel written by a Portuguese existentialist that nobody has heard about. Hell, even Bush read Camus during his vacation. Maybe Obama is saving Dirichlet Branes and Mirror Symmetry for his Spring Break reading list instead.