Wyn Kelley, Melville Scholar and a Senior Lecturer in Literature at MIT, recently posted a beautiful essay analyzing President Obama's literary tastes. As she explains, Obama has listed his favorite books as Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Melville's Moby-Dick. What do these choices suggest about our new President? Wyn writes:

Song of Solomon, the story of an African-American man searching for his identity, seems a likely inspiration for Obama's account of a (somewhat) similar quest, Dreams from My Father. But Moby-Dick? One would hardly associate Obama with Captain Ahab, a man of furious passion bent on revenge. Nor does he much resemble Ishmael. As verbally inclined as Melville's narrator, Obama nevertheless has assumed political leadership, whereas Ishmael prefers the role of observer.

Is it Queequeg, the Pacific Islander, to whom Obama might relate? Starbuck, a "long, earnest man"? No, Wyn argues, it's the whales. (I'll let her explain the rest--it's beautiful and well worth the read.)

It's nice, isn't it, to have a president whose literary tastes seem too complex to interpret easily or quickly? As Michiko Kakutani explains in a recent New York Times Book Review article,

[Obama's] appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Kakutani offers a comparison between Obama's approach to reading and that of former President George W. Bush:

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading -- ruminating upon writers' ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush's 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author's thesis as an idee fixe.

This space--the blog page for Project New Media Literacies--is not intended to be a political space. But in a climate where the work of projects invested in digital media and learning is subject, on the national stage, to the whims and fancies of political appointees, we are by force and dint of law immersed in policy and politics.

It's far too simplistic, of course, to make breezy predictions about how President Obama's literary tastes bode with respect to his approach to education (or the approach of his new Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan--good opinion piece about that here). I don't intend to do that here. Really, in fact, I only wanted a space where I could write the following phrases:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan
Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings

President Barack Obama
Former President George W. Bush