Barack Obama Reading Lists

 

I once came across a blog post by one of the friends I have made through blogging
and was surprised I hadn't seen it before. Yes, President Obama has published a reading list. If there was anything I wouldn't love about him already, this surely would have to be it! He's a fellow readaholic.

These are the lists I looked at in order to put them all together:
Barack Obama Shares Five of the Best Books He Read This Summer
Here Are All the Books You Should Read This Year, According to Barack Obama
86 Books Barack Obama Recommended During His Presidency
All of Obama's Reading Lists Combined
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I will try to update this list in the coming years.

Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem "Coach Wooden and Me"
Abdurragib, Hanif "A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance"
- "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension"
Achebe, Chinua "Things Fall Apart" (The African Trilogy #1)
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi "Americanah"
Akbar, Kaveh "Martyr!"
Akhtar, Ayad "Homeland Elegies"
Alam, Rumaan "Leave the World Behind"
Alderman, Naomi "The Power"
Alte, Jonathan "Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope"
Applebaum, Anne "Twilight of Democracy"Arsenault, Raymond "Arthur Ashe: A Life"
Ayers, William "A Kind And Just Parent"
Baldwin, James "The Fire Next Time"
Bartels, Larry "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age"
Bauer, Shane "American Prison"
Beaton, Kate "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands"
Bennett, Brit "The Vanishing Half"
Blight, David W. "Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom"
Blitzer, Jonathan"Everyone Who Is Gone Here"
Boo, Katherine "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity"
Bradley, Kaliane "The Ministry of Time"
Branch, Taylor "Parting the Waters"
Broom, Sarah M. "The Yellow House"
Bullwinkel, Rita "Headshot"
Caro, Robert A. "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York"
Carr, Nicholas "The Shallows"
Catton, Eleanor "Birnam Wood"
Chan, Jessamine "The School for Good Mothers"
Chang, Lan Samantha "The Family Chao"
Chen, Te-Ping "Land of Big Numbers"
Cep, Casey "Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee"
Chernow, Ron "Grant"
- "Washington: A Life"
Chiang, Ted "Exhalation"
Choi, Susan "Trust Exercise"
Cixin, Liu "The Three-Body Problem"
Coates, Ta-Nehisi "Between the World and Me"
Coll, Steve "Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001"
Conrad, Joseph "Heart of Darkness"
Cornejo Villavicencio, Karla "The Undocumented Americans"
Cosby, S. A. "All the Sinners Bleed"
- "Razorblade Tears"
Dalrymple, William "The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company"
Deneen, Patrik "Why Liberalism Failed"
Desmond, Matthew "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City"
- "Poverty, by America"
Diaz, Hernan "Trust"
Diop, David "At Night All Blood is Black"
Doerr, Anthony "All the Light We Cannot See"
- "Cloud Cuckoo Land"
Du Bois, W. E. B. "The Souls of Black Folk"
Edugyan, Esi "Washington Black"
Egan, Jennifer "The Candy House"
Eggers, Dave "What Is the What"
Eig, Jonathan "King: A Life"
Elliott, Andrea "Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City"
Ellison, Ralph "Invisible Man"
Emerson, Ralph Waldo "Self-Reliance"
Evaristo, Bernardine "Girl, Woman, Other"
Everett, Percival "James"
Finnegan, William "Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life"
Fitzgerald, F. (Francis) Scott "The Great Gatsby"
Flanagan, Richard "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"
Flynn, Gillian "Gone Girl"
Franzen, Jonathan "Crossroads"
- "Freedom"
- "Purity"
Friedman, Thomas L. "Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America"
Gandhi "Autobiography"
Ganz, John "When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s"
García Márquez, Gabriel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Spanish: Cien años de soledad) -
Gawande, Atul "Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End"
Goldstein, Amy "Janesville: An American Story"
Goldstein, Gordon "Lessons in Disaster"
Goodwin, Doris Kearns "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln"
Grann, David "The Wager"
Greene, Graham "The Power and the Glory"
 - "The Quiet American"
Groff, Lauren "Fates and Furies"
- "Florida"
- "Matrix"
Grossman, David "To the End of the Land" (Hebrew: אשה בורחת מבשורה/Isha Nimletet Mi'Bshora)
Gurnah, Abdulrazak "Afterlives"
Halberstam, David "Best and the Brightest"
Halliday, Lisa "Asymmetry"
Hamid, Mohsin "Exit West"
Hamilton, Alexander "The Federalist"
Harari, Yuval Noah "Sapiens. A Brief History of Mankind" (Hebrew: קיצור תולדות האנושות/Ḳizur Toldot Ha-Enoshut)
Harding, Paul "Tinkers"
Harris, Nathan "The Sweetness of Water"
Harrison, Tiffany Clarke "Blue Hour"
Haruf, Kent "Plainsong"
Hawkins, Paula "The Girl on the Train"
Herring, Chris "Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks"
Hong Kingston, Maxine "The Woman Warrior"
Iguodala, Andre "The Sixth Man"
Ishiguro, Kazuo "Klara and the Sun"
Jacques, Brian "Redwall" series
Jahren, Lab "Lab Girl"
Jeffers, Honrée Fanonne "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois"
Johnson, Denis "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden"
 - "The Laughing Monsters"
Johnson, Adam "The Orphan Master's Son"
Jones, Tayari "An American Marriage"
Just, Ward "Rodin’s Debutante"
Kahnemann, Daniel "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Kaplan, Fred "Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer"
Keefe, Patrick Radden "Empire of Pain"
Klay, Phil "Missionaries"
- "Redeployment"
Klein, Ezra "Why We’re Polarized"
Kitamura, Katie "Intimacies"
Ko, Lisa "Memory Piece"
Kolbert, Elizabeth "The Sixth Extinction"
- "Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future"
Kolker, Robert "Hidden Valley Road"
Kumar, Amitava "Immigrant, Montana"
Labatut, Benjamin "When We Cease to Understand the World"
Lahiri, Jhumpa "The Lowland"
Land, Stephanie "Maid"
Landrieu, Mitch "In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History"
Larson, Erik "The Splendid and the Vile"
Le Carré, John "Silverview"
Lehane, Dennis "Small Mercies"
Leilani, Raven "Luster"
Leithauser, Brad "A Few Corrections"
Lerner, Ben "The Topeka School"
Lessing, Doris "The Golden Notebook"
Levitsky, Steven; Ziblatt, Daniel "How Democracies Die"
Lincoln, Abraham - The Collected Works
Luiselli, Valeria "Lost Children Archive"
Macdonald, Helen "H Is For Hawk"
Mailer, Norman "The Naked and the Dead"
Mandel, Emily St. John "The Glass Hotel"
- "Sea of Tranquility"
Mandela, Nelson "Long Walk to Freedom"
Mantel, Hilary "Wolf Hall"
Marra, Anthony "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena"
Matar, Hisham"The Return"
McBride, James "Deacon King Kong"
- "Five-Carat Soul"
McCullough, David "John Adams"
Melville, Herman "Moby Dick"
Mengestu, Dinaw "How to Read the Air"
Moore, Liz "Long Bright River"
- "The God of the Woods"
Moreno-Garcia, Silvia "Velvet Was the Night"
Moretti, Enrico "The New Geography of Jobs"
Morris, Edmund "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt"
Morrison, Toni - Collected Works (I read four of her novels)
Mounk, Yascha "The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure"
Murakami, Haruki "Men Without Women" (Japanese: 女のいない男たちOnna no inai otokotachi)
Naipaul, V.S. "A Bend in the River: His Great Novel of Africa"
- "A House for Mr Biswas"
Napolitano, Ann "Hello Beautiful"
Ngugi wa Thiong’o "A Grain of Wheat"
Nguyen, Eric "Things We Lost to the Water"
Niebuhr, Reinhold "Moral Man And Immoral Society"
Nnuro, DK "What Napoleon Could Not Do"
Obama, Michelle "Becoming"
 - "The Light We Carry"
Obreht, Téa "Inland"
Odell, Jenny "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy"
Ondaatje, Michael "Warlight"
O'Neill, Joseph "Netherland"
Orange, Tommy "There There"
Osnos, Evan "Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China"
Owusu, Nadia "Aftershocks"
Tedlow, Richard S. "Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American"
Park, Barbara "Junie B. Jones" series
Patchett, Ann "These Precious Days"
Payne, Keith "The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die"
Pelecanos, George "The Way Home"
Penn Warren, Robert "All the King's Men"
Perkins, Lynn Rae "Nuts to You"
Perry, Imani "South to America"
Price, Richard "Lush Life"
Radden Keefe, Patrick "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland"
Reeves, Richard "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It"
Rhodes, Ben "The World As It Is. Inside The Obama House"
Robinson, Kim Stanley "The Ministry for the Future"
Robinson, Marylinne "Gilead"
- "Jack"
- "Reading Genesis"
Rooney, Jim "A Different Way to Win: Dan Rooney's Story from the Super Bowl to the Rooney Rule"
Rooney, Sally "Normal People"
Rosling, Hans "Factfulness"
Rowling, J.K. - Harry Potter series
Rundell, Katherine "Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms"
Rushdie, Salman "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights"
Salter, James "All That Is"
Saunders, George "Liberation Day"
Schiff, Stacy "The Revoluitionary: Samuel Adams"
Sendak, Maurice "Where The Wild Things Are"
Serpell, Namwali "The Furrow"
Serrano, Shea "Basketball (and Other Things)"
Sides, Hampton "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook"
Smith, Adam "Wealth of Nations"
- "Theory of Moral Sentiments"
Smith, Clint "How the Word Is Passed"
Smith, Jean Edward "FDR"
Smith, Zadie "Feel Free"
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr "Cancer Ward" (Russian: Ра́ковый ко́рпус, Rákovy kórpus)
Stephenson, Neal "Seveneves"
Stevenson, Robert Louis "Treasure Island"
Steinbeck, John "In Dubious Battle"
 - "Of Mice and Men"
Strong Washburn, Kawai "Sharks in the Time of Saviors"
Strout, Elizabeth "Anything Is Possible"
Taylor, Cory "Dying: A Memoir"
Tegmark, Max "Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence"
Terkel Studs "Working"
Thompson, Peter S. "Philosophy & Literature"
Tóibín, Colm "Nora Webster"
Tolentino, Jia "Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion"
Towles, Amor "A Gentleman in Moscow"
- "The Lincoln Highway"
Trethewey, Natasha "Memorial Drive"
Treuer, David "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present"
Verghese, Abraham "Cutting for Stone"
Wagner, Alex "Futureface: A Family Mystery, an Epic Quest, and the Secret to Belonging"
Walcott, Derek - Collected Poems
Waldmann, Adele "Help Wanted"
Walter, Jess "We Live in Water: Stories"
Walton, Dawnie "The Final Revival of Opal & Nev"
Wang, Quian Julie "Beautiful Country"
Ward, Jesmyn "Sing, Unburied"
Washington, Bryan "Lot: Stories"
Weir, Andy "Project Hail Mary"
Westover, Tara "Educated"
Whitehead, Colson "Harlem Shuffle"
- "The Nickel Boys"
- "Underground Railroad"
- "Harlem Shuffle" by Colson Whitehead
Wilkerson, Charmaine "Black Cake"
Wilkerson, Isabel "Caste"
- "The Warmth of Other Suns"
Wilkinson, Lauren "American Spy"
Williams, Zach "Beautiful Days"
Wilson, Antoine "Mouth to Mouth"
Woodfox, Albert "Solitary"
Woodrell, Daniel "The Bayou Trilogy"
Woodson, Jacqueline "Brown Girl Dreaming"
Yanagihara, Hanya "To Paradise"
Yong, Ed "An Immense World"
Zakaria, Fareed "The Post-American World"
Zauner, Michelle "Crying in H Mart"
Zhang, C Pam "How Much of These Hills is Gold"
Zuboff, Shoshana "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power"

I have not only not read many of the books on this list, only 32, I haven't heard of many of them. Time to go book-hunting.

Last ones added, reading list of  2024:
Abdurraqib, Hanif "There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension"
Akbar, Kaveh "Martyr!"
Blitzer, Jonathan"Everyone Who Is Gone Here"
Bradley, Kaliane "The Ministry of Time"
Bullwinkel, Rita "Headshot"
Everett, Percival "James"
Ganz, John "When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s"
Ko, Lisa "Memory Piece"
Moore, Liz "The God of the Woods"
Reeves, Richard "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It"
Robinson, Marilynne, "Reading Genesis"
Sides, Hampton "The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook"
Waldmann, Adele "Help Wanted"
Williams, Zach "Beautiful Days"

Barack Obama received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009 "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.