Friday, December 26, 2008

Bush the Reader: Doing the Numbers

I see that Karl Rove is back on the Bush-is-a-great reader meme (WSJ, "Bush is a Book Lover, p A11; cf. link). Not wanting to question the veracity of so distinguished a public servant, I must then accept at face value that the number of books the President finished in 2005 was 95. Do the numbers: assume, conservatively, that each book has 250 pages, then that is a total of 23,750 pages for the year. At 30 pages an hour, that would be 791.67 hours spent reading, or the equivalent of just under 20 work weeks. With a pace like that, I wonder how he ever found time to go to church?

Rove also says that he outdid the President in reading, and that the President's excuse was that "he'd been busy as Leader of the Free World." I assume that's a joke.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, it is.
One in very poor taste.
And on all of us.

Ken Houghton said...

"With a pace like that, I wonder how he ever found time to go to church?"

President Bush doesn't go to church. Wherever did you get that idea?