Barack Obama Releases His Favorite Books of 2021

Each year, former President Barack Obama releases a list of his favorite books, which generally include a mix of fiction and nonfiction, new releases and backlist titles. This year, half of them (the second image) are books he’s already recommended earlier this year, while the other half are new recommendations.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Barack Obama (@barackobama)

There are 23 books total on the list this year, an increase from 17 last year.

Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021:

• Matrix by Lauren Groff
• How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith
• The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
• The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
• Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City by Andrea Elliott
• Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
• Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
• These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
• Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
• Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang
• At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
• Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen
• Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
• When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut
• Under A White Sky: The Nature Of The Future by Elizabeth Kolbert
• Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen
• Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
• Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

In the next few days, Obama will also be sharing his favorite movies and music of the year.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.