I applaud Yann Martel’s decision to send Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper a book every two weeks to raise his awareness of the arts, but I can’t help thinking that if someone tried this with President Bush, they’d end up on a watch list, if not on a plane to Gitmo. Even if it was Albert Camus.
Link via Bookslut.
Update 4/18/07:
Come on Yann, Tolstoy? You can’t ween an illiterate man on Tolstoy. Hell, I’m what you might call well read and I don’t even want to read Tolstoy. Why not start him off with something a little more manageable, like Ray Bradbury? Herman Hesse is a good start, too. Anybody but Tolstoy. Why not just drop Ulysses on his desk and be done with it?
Buy him a subscription to the Weekly Reader, if it’s still published, and the Smithsonian’s kids’ magazine.
“Hey Dick, did ya know they had dinosaurs way back before Egyptian times!?”
“Yeah, just don’t tell our base.”