Dierks Bentley Is Convinced Tim McGraw Pranked Him with Gift of Thick Russian Books

Tim McGraw made sure Dierks Bentley was completely booked with this unusual gift.

During a Tuesday, Sept. 2 appearance on Bobby Bones’ BobbyCast show, the country star spoke about a gift McGraw, 58, gave him while talking about his favorite books.

” ‘Tell me the books you read cuz I probably read them.’ That might be the hardest anybody has ever come at me without intention,” Bones, 45, joked about Bentley’s changing gears during the conversation.

Bentley, 49, mentioned Ulysses by James Joyce and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which he finished the day before recording on Bones’ show.

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“You want me to give the greatest flex of all time? And he’ll probably appreciate this story because I don’t know if it’s true or not,” Bentley began.

“But so if he did on purpose, Tim McGraw, we were also talking about books one time together. I don’t know where it was. And he goes, ‘Man, let me send you some books.’ ‘”

“I swear to God, he sent me a cardboard box full of books. Every book was this thick,” he continuned, demonstrating the book’s thickness with his fingers, “but it was Russian. It wasn’t written in Russian, but a book about a Russian painter and this book about Eastern [philosophy].”

“I wish I had the whole collection because it was … you know, with McGraw you can’t tell. Is he pulling a prank on me, or he could be totally serious cuz he’s a one-upper, for sure.” Bentley added that McGraw is a “competitive dude.”

“So I still can’t tell to this day. I need to ask him. And he probably won’t tell. He [will] probably [be] like, ‘Of course I read those books.’ But it was like this huge selection of really thick history books that I’m just like, ‘This has to be a joke.’ But maybe not.”

Bentley proves to be studious in his music as well. Speaking with PEOPLE in May, he explained his selection process for the album Broken Branches, which was released in June.

“I’m always looking for the ones that are kind of the broken branches of music,” he said at the time. “Not the real popular ones, the songs that’re the forgotten misfits that say something kind of quirky and weird, and then seeing what we can do with them. I love finding great music.”

For Broken Branches, Bentley listened to nearly 4,000 songs before picking seven for the album. He also cowrote four.

“So the musicianship of this record really draws from all the different types of players that are here in town, from country to bluegrass,” he added.