While her husband
Dubya prefers
The Very Hungry Caterpillar,
Laura Bush is quite the reader. She recently cited the "
The Grand Inquisitor" section of
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov as her favorite piece of literature. This section features
Jesus Christ suffering at the hands of the
Spanish Inquisition.
"It's about life, and it's about death, and it's about Christ," she recently said, cutting through all that pesky ambiguity in the novel. "I find it really reassuring."
Quips
New York Observer columnist
Ron Rosenbaum, "I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘reassuring.’ If you think the single most vicious and profound
satiric attack on
organized religion is reassuring, then this is the book for you. I’m down with Laura on that."