BARACK OBAMA’S READING LIST
The New York Times’ chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, recently sat down with President Barack Obama to ask him about his life as a reader. During the course of the interview, the president praised several books and authors. And he talked about books that he had given his daughter Malia, including The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston. Here are a few other authors he singled out, along with some of his words about them.
Liu Cixin Obama called the author’s The Three- Body Problem, a three- volume science-fiction novel, “wildly imaginative, really interesting,” saying “the scope of it was immense.”
J unot Dí az and J humpa Lahiri Their books, Obama said, “speak to a very particular contemporary immigration experience. But also this combination of – that I think is universal – longing for this better place, but also feeling displaced and looking backwards at the same time. I think in that sense, their novels are directly connected to a lot of American literature.”
Gillian Flynn “There were books that would blend, I think, really good writing with thriller genres. I mean, I thought Gone Girl was a well- constructed, well- written book.”
Lauren Groff Obama enjoyed Groff ’ s “really powerful” novel Fates and Furies.
Abraham Lincoln Obama said, “He is a very f i ne writer. I’d put the Second Inaugural up against any piece of American writing – as good as anything. One of the great treats of being president is, in the Lincoln Bedroom, there’s a copy of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by him, one of five copies he did for charity. And there have been times in the evening when I’d just walk over, because it’s right next to my office, my home office, and I just read it.”
V. S. Naipaul “His A Bend in the River, which starts with the line, ' The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.' And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”
Marilynne Robinson “We’ve become sort of pen pals,” Obama said. “I started reading her in Iowa, where Gilead and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day.”
Colson Whitehead Obama said that Whitehead ’ s most r ecent novel, The Underground Railroad, is a “reminder of the ways in which the pain of slavery transmits itself across generations, not just in overt ways, but how it changes minds and hearts.”