The Anatomy of an Obama Summer Reading List
Thursday morning brought one of the bookish internet’s favorite days of the year: former President and reader-in-chief Barack Obama released his summer reading list.
These lists, which Obama has been sharing along with end-of-year “best of” lists since 2009 (though he skipped summer reading in 2012, 2013, and 2020), arrive devoid of all context or commentary. The man is too busy to blurb, I get it, and that almost makes Obama Summer Reading List Day more fun because it means the internet gets to engage in one of our favorite activities: wild speculation.
How does Obama find the books he reads and recommends? No one really knows, or those who do aren’t talking. Does he actually read the books? I’ll let him answer that one himself (and how dare you even ask such a thing!).
After nearly a decade and a half of trying to decode Obama’s book lists, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fine, actually, that he doesn’t say much about his selections. We can let them speak for themselves.
The very first summer list, from August 2009, contained just six titles, and all of them were by men! Obama’s lists have become longer, more diverse, and more interesting over the years, but they tend to follow a general pattern. On just about every list, you’ll find:
The Big Nonfiction Book About Sociopolitical Issues
In 2009, it was Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman. This year, it’s Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond. Other highlights include The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (2011), Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in New China by Evan Osnos (2014), The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015), The Shallows by Nicholas Carr (2019), and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe (2021).
The Critically Acclaimed Literary Novel
Lush Life by Richard Price kicked off this category in 2009, and this year’s entry, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, reflects Obama’s evolving taste. Jonathan Franzen made an appearance in 2010 with Freedom. 2011’s summer pick was Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (maybe Oprah recommended it to him?), and it stayed a total dudefest until 2015, when Obama finally picked a novel by a woman: The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. More recent highlights: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), and last summer’s hat trick of Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, The Candy House by Jennifer Egan, and To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara.
The Dad Book
You know this pick when you see it. For 2009’s list, it was John Adams by David McCullough. This year, we’ve got King: A Life by Jonathan Eig and David Grann’s The Wager (there’s nothing more dadly than a book about tall ships). Ron Chernow showed up in 2015 with Washington: A Life and again in 2017 for Grant. But there’s more to this category than giant biographies! Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal fits right in (2014), as does William Finnegan’s excellent surfing memoir Barbarian Days (2016).
The Swiss Army Fiction Pick
These are the novels that are good, pleasant, and totally inoffensive. You can give them to your mother-in-law and not worry that anything will make her clutch her pearls. 2009’s list highlighted Plainsong by Kent Haruf, which is maybe the closest a novel has come to embodying the American Midwest since Willa Cather, and that’s a compliment. This year, it’s Oprah pick Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010), All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2015), and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2017) are other exemplars of the category.
As he got into the back half of his second term and presumably became less invested in the public’s reaction to his every utterance (not having to run for reelection will do that for you), Obama’s book lists were longer and more varied. In recent years, he’s picked books that address race, class, and politics head-on: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015), Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (both 2022).
And it’s not all-serious-all-the-time! There are thrillers like The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (2017) and Razorblade Tears (2022) and All the Sinners Bleed (2023), both by S.A. Cosby. There’s speculative fiction, including Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (2016), The Power by Naomi Alderman (2017), Exhalation by Ted Chiang (2019), and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021). And it seems that not even Obama can resist the Blockbuster Memoir, since the holy trifecta of H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (2016), Educated by Tara Westover (2018), and Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (2019) all make appearances.
Perhaps the most exciting recent development in the Obama reading lists–and the one with the most potential to change the trajectory of an author’s life—is his inclusion of lesser-known debuts by writers of color. Short story collections are a tough sell to even avid readers, and Te-Ping Chen’s Land of Big Numbers (2021) has nearly as many Amazon ratings as Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro’s beloved 2001 collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Now, it’s pure speculation that Obama is responsible for Chen’s visibility (see above re: the internet’s favorite activities), but I think it’s a reasonable guess. Summer 2022’s debut selections, Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson and The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, both had robust marketing campaigns, so it’s harder to speculate about the Obama effect, but it couldn’t have hurt.
At this writing, it’s been less than 24 hours since the 2023 list featuring Blue Hour by Tiffany Clarke Harrison and What Napoleon Could Not Do by DK Nnuro was released, so it’s too soon to tell. Whether Obama’s lists move the sales needle or not, this is literally the kind of publicity you can’t buy, and I love to see it happen for books and writers the publishing industry is historically unlikely to place big bets on.
As for where Obama’s book lists will go next, I’d like to hazard a guess that the titles he shares do not reveal all of the books he’s reading so much as they reflect his understanding of where the public is willing to go with him. The early lists reveal a serious person who understands that his reading list needs to look ~presidential. They gradually expand and loosen up throughout his presidency, culminating with summer 2016’s list that is three parts fun to two parts serious. In his post-presidential years, Obama’s lists have reflected broader trends in reading: it’s cool now for literary writers to experiment with genre, and serious readers don’t lose any street cred for reading straight-up genre. The biggest publishing hits of the last few years—Colleen Hoover, Sarah J. Maas, and Emily Henry—have all revolved around romance. Will Obama follow the crowd? I’m not convinced Barack is ready to tell the world he’s read a bodice-ripper, but I’d be delighted to see it happen, and should the day come, Book Riot has some recommendations for him.
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