Mayor Daley, in a point of time of...

Mayor Daley, in a point of time of uncharacteristic candor, was self-reliant enough to admit this week that he had "not yet" had a chance to read the latest "One volume One Chicago" selection: Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies.

With the holiday weekend coming up plus the remarkably long flight on his planned I'm-cool-like-Obama trip to Ghana, I'm certain he'll have a chance to obtain to it soon. After all, the pressure's onward

President Bush upp the summer reading ante this year, when, in early August, he announced that he'd read Albert Camus' The Stranger. Since then, public figures everywhere have been scrambling to find "smart" main division s to tuck under their arms and tote around.

This weekend, as summer winds down, it might on the same level be time for a not many of the more conscientious among them to crack spread a cover or two.

The excessively idea of our political leaders embracing serious literature -- despite its dangerous association with all things Eastern and elitist -- is enough to thrill nerdy English majors like me Because just as I am obligated to retain telling my parents that the master's grade in literature they paid for really has been super-useful in my career, I am also forever attached to the idea that reading is an exercise in self-improvement.

And, anyway, I've always been a lump-fish for the kind of stay who, when he is not sitting in a filled with smoke coffee shop filling his Moleskine notebook with existentialist doodles, can small quantity names like Camus and Kafka into conversation with casual ease. Admittedly, I am also the kind of character who liked having a Rhode scholar as president and daydreams about our fatherland being represented, on the world stage, on someone who doesn't talk with provender in his mouth.

moreover I digress.

Following the syllabus

There are any number of overly simple ways to separate population into opposite types -- those who have waited tables and those who haven't, for example -- moreover for sheer predictive ability, individual of the most useful dividing lines is the single in kind between the kids who, back in gymnasium did all the reading and those who did not.

Those of us who kept to the syllabus waited to be rule-followers in all areas of life. Punctual and law-abiding, we have grown up to be the commonalty who wait for that little on-ramp traffic light to acknowledge us when we can immerge onto the expressway. We wear our seat-belts and eat our vegetables.

We might have mid-life crises, nevertheless only in socially acceptable forms. Years after our last appearance upon an honor roll, we are still remarkably easy to flaw Especially today. Because it's the day before Labor Day weekend and we're in the office, wondering if the bos will lease us out early.

The other kids, admitting -- the ones who prided themselves onward their ability to answer essay questions and give oral reports without at any time having read more than the back hide of a book -- are harder to pin down.

one have dropped out. Or flamed not at home But others have succeeded brilliantly in all sorts of stakes where rule-following is a handicap rather than a virtue.

Taking their word for it

Being a geek at heart, I am overly fastidious about what I claim to have read.

I've made it better than halfway between the sides of Moby Dick, but never all the way, and, in my guilt, I have a inclination to confess this failing at completely inopportune avails like whenever someone mentions Nantucket.

Similarly, I have listened to Foucault's Pendulum forward tape -- an extremely bad idea if you are trying to pay attention to road signs at the same time -- if it were not that have never actually read the volume And this bothers me. A allotment

to such a degree I have to assume that if the president says he read The Stranger -- plus, he says, "three Shakespeares" -- he really has read it. And if Mayor Daley says he's going to read The Interpreter of Maladies, he means it.

The question for me then, is what these busy, important men will do with what they find in these great works

If President Bush and Mayor Daley were in the same work group, what would they talk about above wine and cheese?

Power corrupts

granting they are, theoretically, political opposites, the president and the mayor would be seen to have much in general

There's the whole relentles consolidation of power thing. And the black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me worldview. And the sputtering. And the popular perception, however erroneous, that they're not exactly intellectual heavyweights.

mainly though, they have managed, despite their bloodlines, to be understood as "regular" stays who don't have a doom of need for fancy essence Real men.

And if it's unexpectedly OK for them to read the "hard" volumes and think big thoughts, maybe there's one hope that the nerdy kids among us will finally get by heart a chance to feel unimpassioned

Just imagine what the world would be like if our leaders bothered to do their homework.

e-mail: dpickett@suntimes.com

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