History (and Karl Rove) have judged him, and it seems George Bush’s legacy will be one of too little action and too much reading. According to an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the 43rd president reads an average of over 500 hours every year (that’s 12-13 weeks of 9-5 full time reading, more if you have a paid lunch).

Apart from reading “Team of Rivals” back in 2005 (before it was cool), in 2006 he breezed through the two-and-a-half pound “A History of the English Speaking Peoples Since 1900″ before some light Camus in the bathtub. Assuming that Karl Rove and the Wall Street Journal are to be trusted and that 2006 through 2008 weren’t wildly atypical years, over his presidency, Bush read approximately:

• 496 books (62 a year, 99.8% of which were not written by family members)
• 246,000 pages (roughly 31,000 a year)
• over 4,100 hours (assuming that a Yalie reads at about 1 page a minute)
• over 100 work weeks

So next time you’re upset that Bush is only “glanc[ing] at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving”, cut the man some slack. Who else is going to read eleven-hundred page definitive histories of the Spanish Civil War? John Bolton? Sarah Palin?

Note: All numbers are available in this spreadsheet, please point out any errors. All page counts are from Amazon.com. Note that I haven’t included any numbers for “each year, the president also read the Bible from cover to cover” which could add as much as 16,000 pages to the total.