I was thinking of books by Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, ME Bradford, Warren Brookes, James Burnham, Forrest McDonald, Bernard Bailyn and so forth. If you read serious books or authors you tend to mention them because they are on your mind.
Rush doesn’t, because his reading is the sort of current events material that you have mentioned. That makes him an observer and commentator. Which is fine, but my point is that he’s not some sort of serious thinker.
When he mentions books and authors it’s detective novels or conservative fiction, because that’s what he likes to read. I find him entertaining since I’m a political junkie. I’ll miss him if and when he quits, but he’s not exactly a professor of political philosophy. But then that’s not what I expect out of him.