New site FiveBooks.com (new to me, anyway), which specializes in interviewing public figures and getting their reading recommendations, has put up an interview with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels about five tomes he recommends. The list is as safe and dry as the man himself — The Road to Serfdom, Free to Choose, Charles Murray’s What It Means to Be a Libertarian, Mancur Olson’s Rise and Decline of Nations, and Virginia Postrel’s Future and Its Enemies.

Most of these are not bad books — Olson’s is a very good one — and there are worse things a politician could read. But how can anyone respect a man with such a taste for “conventional libertarianism,” the O’Doul’s of political philosophy? If you’re going to be a libertarian, read some Rothbard; smash a glass with David Friedman, not just his father. Go for something weird, like Isabel Paterson’s God of the Machine, or fun, like Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.

Perhaps Daniels should get some hip young bloggers to tell him how to make reading cool.