Loughner's Reading List

Can we please stop the growing meme that Jared Loughner's reading list alone paints him (alone) as a kook or a left-wing radical?

Andrew Klavan in City Journal:

He read books by Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell, among others. He did not believe in God.

Look, any intelligent young person ought to be reading Hitler, Marx, Plato, and Orwell. And much more. I suspect most of you here have read most of Loughner's favorite books, and if you'd listed your favorite books when you were his age it'd probably look equally bizarre. Remember The Hundredth Monkey?

Here's his own list of favorite books, from his YouTube channel:

I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

I don't know about you, but were assigned to read Mein Kampf in high school history class. Also Marx's Communist Manifesto. Also Rousseau, Locke, Hegel, Nietzsche, Trotsky, Trevor-Roper, Kissinger, and many others I've surely forgotten. I did have a truly great history teacher, but I think any intellectually curious young person ought to be reading these writers.

(Though maybe listing Mein Kampf as a "favorite" is a little suspect.)