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86 Books Barack Obama Has Recommended During His Presidency
23.01.2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After an eventful and historic run, Barack Obama’s final term as president comes to a close on January 20. One of the legacies he will leave behind is a fervent passion for reading. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Obama said that books offered “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes,” and they “have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years.”

President Obama has never been one to keep his love of literature a secret. He’s made a regular habit of sharing reading lists, and in honor of his exit from the White House, Entertainment Weekly has compiled a list of every book he has recommended during his time as president.

The entries were pulled from places like Obama’s summer reading lists, his childhood favorites, and recommendations made for his daughter, Malia. They include plenty of classics such as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as many contemporary works. And, of course, he made time to brush up on the lives of his predecessors, reading biographies of John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

In an interview with WIRED last year, President Obama cited several titles that significantly shaped him, including: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari; Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert; In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck; and Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. They’re just a fraction of the full list, but WIRED calculated that it would take the typical reader 89 hours to get through those 10 books alone. Let’s see if you can finish all 86 in time for our country’s next Inauguration Day.

1. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer

2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

3. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

4. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston

5. Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson

6. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

7. Nora Webster, Colm Toibin

8. The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson

9. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos

10. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande

11. Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, Katherine Rundell

12. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan

13. Redwall series, Brian Jacques

14. Junie B. Jones series, Barbara Park

15. Nuts To You, Lynn Rae Perkins

16. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan

17. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald

18. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

19. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson

20. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead

21. All That Is, James Salter

22. The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert

23. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri

24. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

25. Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow

26. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr

27. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

28. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

29. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

30. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

31. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

32. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson

33. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison

34. Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch

35. Gilead, Marylinne Robinson

36. Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam

37. The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton

38. Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois

39. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

40. The Quiet American, Graham Greene

41. Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

42. Gandhi’s autobiography

43. Working, Studs Terkel

44. Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

45. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith

46. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren

47. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

48. To the End of the Land, David Grossman

49. Purity, Jonathan Franzen

50. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipau

51. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff

52. Lush Life, Richard Price

53. Netherland, Joseph O’Neill

54. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie

55. Redeployment, Phil Klay

56. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

57. Plainsong, Kent Haruf

58. The Way Home, George Pelecanos

59. What Is the What, Dave Eggers

60. Philosophy & Literature, Peter S. Thompson

61. Collected Poems, Derek Walcott

62. In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck

63. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

64. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin

65. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling

66. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris

67. John Adams, David McCullough

68. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan

69. Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alte

70. FDR, Jean Edward Smith

71. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin

72. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln

73. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, Thomas L. Friedman

74. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll

75. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels

76. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro

77. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos

78. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman

79. Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr

80. A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers

81. The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria

82. Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein

83. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari

84. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin

85. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, Richard S. Tedlow

86. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo