In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

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I have no idea if these are President Clinton's 21 favorite books, and I don't agree that it's a purely political concoction, per Terry Teachout. It's a bit too weird for that.

I'm most inclined to believe that Becker spoke deeply to Clinton, and I don't mean that as a compliment. I suspect he genuinely enjoyed the Garcia Marquez, Thomas Wolfe, Bill Styron, Ralph Ellison. I'm not at all surprised he greatly admired Taylor Branch's book; Branch is an old friend, and Civil Rights is the glorious crusade Clinton wants to be associated with by virtue of his baby-boomerdom.

I haven't read the Lincoln biography, but Presidents are supposed to read about prior Presidents, and I should think a "human" treatment of Lincoln would particularly appeal to Clinton. (Everyone should be moved by Lincoln, but I imagine different people would prefer different Lincolns. John McCain's Lincoln, I imagine, is rather different from Clinton's. I myself was very moved by Alan Guelzo's book, Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, a "spiritual" biography; that tells you more about me than it does about Lincoln.)

Other books (Angelou's autobiography, Hillary's campaign-feeler coffee table job) require no comment.

Then there are the books that raise an eyebrow of suspicion. Marcus Aurelius? That doesn't sound like Clinton, a man of notorious indiscipline. The Four Quartets? Eliot? Really? That can hardly be Clinton trying to sound intellectual; Eliot is so 1955. It's almost quaint to think of him thinking back to a college-era experience of Literature with a capital "L" - that's the only way I can explain it.

Other books strike me as ephemeral; they are books Clinton read recently, and so remembers vividly, though I doubt they will be among his favorites for a decade.

Then there's Homage to Catalonia, a particularly interesting choice as Teachout notes. The book had a profound impact on me (I read it in college, as part of a seminar on the Spanish Civil War), but Orwell has something for just about everyone (everyone intelligent, at least). It takes a particular sort of writer to earn the admiration of a reactionary like John Derbyshire (who loves quoting Muggeridge on Orwell: "he loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future"), an iconoclastic Enlightenment crusader like Christopher Hitchens (who wrote a whole book about Why Orwell Matters), and a (rhetorical) bomb-throwing anti-American radical like Noam Chomsky (who drew heavily on Orwell's account in Homage in his essay, "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" from American Power and the New Mandarins). So I don't know how much we learn about Clinton from the fact that he claims Homage as one of his favorite books, other than it means he's smart and well-read, which we already knew. I'd be very interested to know why that book is among his favorites, though, what it meant to him, when it meant that to him, etc.
posted by Noah at 5:19 PM