Washington — The second National U.S. Book Fair turned into something of a summit between the U.S. and Russian first ladies, Laura Bush and Lyudmila Putina last weekend.

Putina is gradually becoming more active on the international scene and visited Washington at Laura Bush's invitation.

Putina attended the book festival for the first time last year, during the Russian-U.S. summit in the autumn. The book festival's main aim is to get American children enthusiastic about reading, especially books by American authors.

To get this message across, NBA stars, popular actors and prominent scientists and politicians joined Bush in reading books to children in pavilions set up by the Library of Congress building on Capitol Hill.

Before moving into the White House, Bush was a librarian; she has been active in promoting the book festivals. This time around, she found support from Putina.

Putina arrived from Moscow accompanied by several literature and Russian-language specialists and translators interested in seeing how the Americans are encouraging American children to read American books.

"Today, when kids spend their days at their computers playing Nintendo, reading real rather than electronic books, spending time with their parents and going to libraries could give our future generation better moral health, broader interests and more talent," said Laurence Johnson, a librarian from Kansas.

The festival opened on the White House lawn early Saturday morning. Laura Bush then invited Putina for morning tea, and U.S. president George Bush and Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, later joined the two first ladies.

Laura Bush spoke not only of the importance of reading books by American authors, but also mentioned Russian writers.

In particular, she referred to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, no doubt recalling how Rice gave her husband "Crime and Punishment" to read just before the May summit in Moscow.

Putina said little. She noted that, in her opinion, books were more important for children than computers.

She spent more of her time finding out about how the book festival was organized and what role Laura Bush played in the initiative.

The two first ladies then visited one of the festival pavilions and took part in the presentation of the Borders project, which Library of Congress head James Billington has been directing for more than two years now.

"We're very happy that our project studying the opening up of America and Russia by pioneers, going from the west to the east in Russia, and from the east to the west here, has received such strong support from the wives of the Russian and U.S. presidents," Billington said.

"I hope this will lay a good foundation for stepping up cultural cooperation between our two countries and our peoples."

While in Washington, Putina said she would like to organize a similar book festival in Russia.

A likely time for such an event to take place would be during the 300-year anniversary celebrations in St. Petersburg next May. This time, Laura Bush would be the honored guest.