Last week, the New York Times carried a story about President Obama on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Not hard news—far from it—the story offered assembled tidbits of press coverage as reporters hung out at local bars and T-shirt shops and golf courses hoping for views of POTUS.

Two tidbits in particular struck me: Obama, unlike other recent presidential golfers, plays slowly and methodically and honestly. (Clinton, apparently, not only rushed through the eighteen holes but shaved points off his score, no surprise from a man who parsed the meaning of “is.”)

But back to the current POTUS, and the second item: Obama’s reading list. Ambitious for a week, especially a week of long golf games, and predictably presidential in its scope of current affairs and historical biographies, David McCullough and Tom Friedman.

But here’s what caught me eye, about two-thirds of the way down the list: Kent Haruf’s wonderful novel, Plainsong. Obama’s reading fiction didn’t come as a surprise—this president, when candidate, cited Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as one of his favorite books. And yet I found myself cheered—and even moved—by the inclusion of Plainsong.

The book, of course, hardly goes unrecognized. Published in 2000, it gleaned awards, glowing testimonials, and finalist status for the National Book Award. And yet it’s a novel that attracts, in its praise and descriptions, words like simple, wisdom, grace, spare, simple, humble. It’s not a sexy best-seller, a conspiracy-theory thriller, a partisan polemic. It’s not escapist or topical as much as it compelling and timeless—and as such, even more topical than the latest hipster lit. It’s a book to love.

I read it at the same time my father did. During a rainy winter weekend, we sat in front of the fire—this would have been the year after my mother died, when he and I spent a lot of time sitting together—and read. We took turns, from the same copy.

I can’t recall who started or finished the book first, but I remember how thoroughly we discussed the characters, the pregnant teenager Victoria and the two McPheron brothers who take her in, and our visceral responses to the events on the page, which felt utterly real. I think of those discussions, in a certain sense, as beginning to pave the way toward a greater confidence and trust between my father and myself. Bookworms, both of us, solitary, introspective, we’d had always found ease in each other’s company—but now, with my vivacious outgoing mother no longer with us, we forged a deeper trust in, and reliance on, one’s another company and opinion. I miss him tremendously.

Because we were both born in 1961, I feel an affinity with President Obama that I’ve never remotely sensed with any other POTUS. How could I? They were from older generations, and regardless of politics, they seemed, well, other.

But this president is my age, a fact that shines light on my own youth/age/achievements as well as his—to put a solipsistic spin on it. After all, we would have both hung out at parties where the Talking Heads boomed and the air grew fuggy with late-seventies marijuana. As children, we may have watched the same episodes of Captain Kangaroo and H.R Pufnstuf.

I voted for Obama. I flew a flag on Election Day, the day after, and on Inauguration Day. I wore a Yes We Can button. And now, all these months later, after buyouts and bailouts and ballooning deficits, after the reality of the health-care debate and the falling approval rates, I feel renewed inspiration and encouragement by his reading of a book published seven years ago, a book that—on the surface at least—says nothing about how to govern this country in 2009.

And yet. The fact that a man who does govern this country chooses to read fiction of such power—well, it makes me happy. It may not solve any of this country’s problems, but when I tune in next week to listen to Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress, I’ll see in his face that he knows what the McPherons did for Victoria, and she for them, and somehow that will make me want to do more, too.