People who have observed him over the years are skeptical of his interests in the literary realm.

“He doesn’t read at all. I’m not overstating things here,” said Timothy L. O’Brien, who wrote “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “He lacks the patience, curiosity and self-awareness to be a good reader, and that’s why aides and advisers know the best way to communicate complex thoughts to him is with pictures and charts, or simply verbally.”

Mr. Trump’s habit of critiquing books but not reading them is just another way he differs from many of his predecessors, several of whom were also authors, and who espoused a love for reading.

Barack Obama still shares his regular reading lists, and he interviewed at least one author during the course of his presidency. He also said that he read books that offered viewpoints that countered his own.

“I think that there are writers who I don’t necessarily agree with in terms of their politics,” Mr. Obama said during a 2017 interview, “but whose writings are sort of a baseline for how to think about certain things.”

Bill Clinton, a sucker for the suspense genre, recently co-wrote a mystery novel. George W. Bush used to have reading competitions with Karl Rove, who wrote in 2008 that Mr. Bush “always had a book nearby.” And even Ronald Reagan, a former actor, did his part to prompt a reading craze: He invited Tom Clancy to the White House after telling Time magazine that Mr. Clancy’s Cold War thriller, “The Hunt for Red October,” was “the perfect yarn.”

Mr. Trump, a TV obsessive, operates differently, though he has frequently bragged about his own literary prowess.

On the campaign trail, he falsely claimed to CNN that his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” was “the No. 1 selling business book of all time, at least I think, but I’m pretty sure it is.” And in a 2005 letter to The New York Times, Mr. Trump claimed he was a frequent reader — “I’ve read John Updike, I’ve read Orhan Pamuk, I’ve read Philip Roth” — as he took a journalist who had written about him to task.