An interesting article about “One Book, One City” programs in yesterday’s New York Times:

Despite what your high school English teacher may have told you, literature does not make us or our society better. To be seduced by fiction is to live at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life. I’ve never entirely succumbed to a story without blowing off housework, neglecting social obligations and flubbing career-critical deadlines….

We’re told to read the canon because it’s the repository of our cultural heritage, which is broadly true in the sense that some of our forebears read some of these books on occasion. In the narrow sense, however, most writers now considered canonical wouldn’t have recognized a Western idea if it bit them — they considered themselves Greek or Hebrew or Christian, not Western, and bitterly opposed most of the other ideas now mushed together into the porridge pot that is our idealized past….

Literature takes root in a rich and stubborn particularity, not in some powdery notion of communal uplift.

Also from yesterday’s Times:

President Bush told Russia’s foreign minister he is preparing for his first trip to Russia by reading the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the 19th-century author whose works explored the dark recesses of the Russian soul.

But Mr. Bush has picked the wrong author, Russians say, because the Russia he will be visiting this week is not the Russia of Dostoyevsky, with mystical saints and guilt-stricken madmen, but a more rational and forward-looking nation that is being pushed, prodded and promoted by his host, President Vladimir V. Putin.

“Bush is reading Dostoyevsky, but he should be reading Nabokov, because that is where the future is, not the past,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, a professor in international affairs at the New School University.

Like Dostoyevsky, Mr. Putin is a nationalist. But like Vladimir Nabokov, the émigré writer, Mr. Putin also seems to have a clear understanding of what Russia lacks, and of what the West has to offer.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I just can’t imagine George W. Bush understanding, much less enjoying the novels of Vladamir Nabokov. I find it difficult enough to imagine him understanding Crime and Punishment.