Former White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal recounting his four years of annual contests with George W. Bush to see who could read the most books. “We recommended volumes to each other (for example, he encouraged me to read a Mao biography; I suggested a book on Reconstruction’s unhappy end). We discussed the books and wrote thank-you notes to some authors.” In this year’s contest, “as of today, his total is 40 volumes to my 64. His reading this year included a heavy dose of history — including David Halberstam’s […]