It's a very common question. Obama was asked. Here's an excerpt:
In October, the New York Times asked Obama to provide a list of books and writers that were significant to him. Here goes – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, W. E. B. DuBois’ Souls of Black Folk, Martin Luther King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Robert Caro’s Power Broker, Studs Terkel’s Working, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments, and also Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men – a novel about a corrupt Southern governor (Rod Blagojevich anyone?). And then there were his theology and philosophy influences - Friedrich Nietzsche, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
So after Sarah has run for president fot 4 years, she too can present a list that her advisors compiled. But do see where Barack left of Mein Kempf and Marxist’s Communist Manifesto or what about Confessions of A Black Liberationist.
Judging Palin unfit because of how she answered "What do you read?" -- not by providing a carefully honed list, as the NYT asked and accepted of Obama, but by stating impromptu verbally off-the-cuff while cameras are running --using that as a means to judge Palin's value is elitist and very naively stupid. If you think that answer would tell you anything more than how good that person is ala Eddie Haskell at schmoozing easily-impressed saps, then you ain't been out much and you've probably been bamboozled by con artists a lot more than you know.