Throughout his career, George Bush cultivated the image of the common man. Unlike Al Gore or John Kerry, he was a guy Americans would be happy to have a beer with - well, fruit juice maybe, as the president gave up the bottle long ago.

Now comes incontrovertible evidence that Bush's country bumpkin persona was a bit of a front. Karl Rove, in a piece for the Wall Street Journal, tells us that underneath that bluff exterior, Bush was, if not exactly an intellectual, an avid reader. According to Rove - often referred to as Bush's brain - the two competed for the last four years over who read the most books. By the end of 2006, Bush had read a highly respectable 95 books to Rove's 110. That works out at about two books a week - a fairly impressive feat for such real masters of the universe.

The overplayed folksiness should come as no big surprise as his father tried to pull the same stunt - to much less convincing effect. Bush senior may have told us he kept pork rinds on his desk, but he always came across as politically high caste. Bush junior played the game much better, down to the use of the vernacular ("bring 'em on"). While it may have sounded jarring to polite company, it probably went down well with Joe Six-pack.

But what kind of books did Dubya devour? Lots of biographies, particularly political ones: Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, King Leopold, William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, LBJ - and Genghis Khan. But there was also time for fiction with the president showing a penchant for Travis McGee novels by John MacDonald (eight). Perhaps most surprising on the 2006 list was Albert Camus's The Outsider - the archetypal novel of alienation. For good measure, each year they competed, Bush read the Bible cover to cover.

Bush certainly does not come over the bookish type - unlike Barack Obama, who has already written two thoughtful sets of memoirs, or John Kennedy who prided himself on his speed reading. But as Rove writes in the Journal:

"In the 35 years I've known George W Bush, he's always had a book nearby. He plays up being a good ol' boy from Midland, Texas, but he was a history major at Yale and graduated from Harvard Business School. You don't make it through either unless you are a reader."

What should we take away from Rove's revelation? At the very least, Bush felt he had to cover up this side of his persona as if a keenness on books would be prejudicial to his political health. Refreshingly, Obama does not feel he has to project an image of a country hick, although it never hurts US politicians to play the anti-intellecual card. "Nattering nabobs of negativism", was how Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's veep, dismissed the chattering classes. Ironically the phrase was coined by William Safire, Nixon's speechwriter and an intellectual if ever there was one.

Commenting on Bush's reading material, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post makes the point that while impressive, it is narrow. Absent, for example, are any books that criticised the Iraq war, such as Tom Ricks's Fiasco or George Packer's The Assassins' Gate. But then Bush does not seem to do soul-searching, at least not when it came to Iraq.

So how on earth did The Outsider get in there? Is Bush going to get more existential on us, in terms of reading, when he leaves office? Post your suggestions below of books the soon to be former president could usefully read.