reading lists

Last summer, President Bush announced that he was reading "The Stranger" by Camus--what a perfect choice, I thought--either he's an idiot, and the irony is sickening, or he's not, and his cynicism blows me away. What a tidy metaphor for the larger debate surrounding this man. Similarly, Clinton, when asked what his favorite book is, couldn't settle on one, and came up with a list. Imagine my glee when Mitt Romney, a MORMON contender for the republican nomination for president in 2008, was asked what his favorite book is. Mormon, to me, already indicates a serious lapse in sanity. Intolerant, you say? Go look up what these people decide to believe. Do it. They're willfully irrational. Anyway, his answer was that the bible is his favorite book (trite, trite), BUT that L. Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth" is his favorite novel. (L. Ron Hubbard being the founder of Scientology, a cult that asks its adherents to believe that traumatic memories stem from tiny bits of alien that exploded way back when and became attached to humans. really.) How perfect is that?