The article claims that Bush was having a contest to see who read the most
books. This is probably fairly creditable. Just reading more books does
not necessarily make one more literate, and contests just encourage surface
reading rather than deep understanding.
So I can well believe it happened. But I thought I read that Bush disliked
long memos, so how could a long book be attractive? I suspect that he had
problems with expository text, but not with narrative text. This is typical
of students who have difficulty with understanding science.