It’s not exactly My Pet Goat, but it appears that our president-elect is something of a reader. Barack Obama has been spotted at least twice by the mainstream press with a book in hand. The industry newsletter Shelf Awareness alerted us to this image:

in which the incoming President is seen carrying a copy of Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan. And the British newspaper the Telegraph spotted him encumbered thusly:

The Telegraph says the book is Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems, 1948-1984.

And The New York Times wonders whether Obama is the “new Oprah” when it comes to promoting books: whenever Obama cites a book, book lovers — and publishers — go nuts, as when Obama mentioned, in passing and without specifying its title, a book about Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he was reading. The Times quotes Adam Cohen, author of the forthcoming Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, as saying:

When people write history, they do not think that it will have any impact on world events. So the idea that we now have a president-elect who is reading multiple books of history and is reading them to shape how he will approach his presidency, I think is inspiring to historians everywhere and augurs well for his presidency. If those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, President Obama seems to really be trying to learn the lessons of history and any historian, whether he reads their book or not, should be very pleased by that.

The Associated Press recently wrote about how excited writers are to see a man of letters — Obama is a bestselling author, after all, as well as a reader — ascend to the Oval Office:

Writers welcome Obama as a peer, a thinker, a man of words — his own words.

“When I was watching Obama’s acceptance speech (Tuesday night), I was convinced that he had written it himself, and therefore that he was saying things that he actually believed and had considered,” says Jane Smiley, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Acres” and other fiction.

“I find that more convincing in a politician than the usual thing of speaking the words of a raft of hack speechwriters. If he were to lie to us, he would really be betraying his deepest self.”

The AP quotes author and former Hillary Clinton supporter Rick Moody to explain Obama’s appeal to those of a literary bent:

I think the larger issue is cultural. There’s a trickle down from the top in the way art exists inside and outside of the culture as a whole. Here in the USA, you could feel in the Bush years how little regard there was for it. People who disliked art, literature, dance, fine arts, they had a lot of cover for this antipathy. There’s reason to believe that we are in for a much better period.

Will the next four-to-eight years be better for book lovers? We’ll see…