George the Outsider

And why wouldn't the US President have refined literary tastes? The Guardian has the story:

"Every summer, George W Bush's holiday reading is announced. This year Bush mockers have been given pause. The president has apparently just finished Albert Camus' famous tale of alienation, L'Etranger. (In translation, c'est vrai.) Not quite what we might have expected...
There seems a high voltage in the president's choice of a novel whose white protagonist murders an Arab. But Bush's reading of The Outsider was apparently notable for the intellectual debate it sparked with his aides. "He found it an interesting book and a quick read," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of
existentialism."
Without going too deep into it, "existentialist" is probably not the right word. "Absurdist" seems closer to the mark. The universe is shown to be utterly indifferent, human institutions are founded on deception and hypocrisy and the nearest thing to a moral purpose the individual can find is mere truthfulness about this bleak state of affairs. It is not quite the American Way...
All this is disturbing proof that George W is not the weird being that we had all liked to suppose. A few months ago, Camus' novel came top in a poll conducted for G2 among male Guardian-reading types, who were asked what book had most influenced them. The Outsider beat off JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to claim the distinction of the book most likely to have changed their lives. Oh dear. Perhaps, chaps, George is one of us."

Aye, well, maybe. Albert Camus is not my idea of holiday reading. But a craving for intellectual respectability on the part of the White House is not to be sniffed at.


Update:

More unlikely literary explorations in The Herald (here):

"I must say the widespread notion that footballers are thick and illiterate - largely put about by blokes like me - really has taken a hit in the past week with the revelation that the Rangers defender Julien Rodriguez spent his summer reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I couldn't believe it when informed that the apparently cultured and bookish Rodriguez had ploughed his way through Tolstoy's 900-page classic. This is the first time in history that the Russian writer, whom I'm pleased to report fathered 13 children, has had an impact on Scottish football. What with Paul Le Guen holding an economics degree, and Rodriguez seeming to be a student of the epic 19th-century Russian novel, things might be becoming slightly highbrow in the Rangers dressing room these days. The next thing you know, Barry Ferguson, unhealthily influenced by this new rush of existentialism inside Ibrox, will be quoting Jean Paul Sartre to us at press conferences."