Obama's Reading List, Revised
We've been tracking, and speculating on, Barack Obama's reading on a regular basis here (e.g., Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fred Kaplan, and JFK), and from various press reports (and his Facebook page), we've cobbled together a list of books he's mentioned reading, and in most cases admiring, in different places, for our Inauguration 2009 store.
Today in the Times, Michiko Kakutani has put her own list together, along with a little analysis of Obama as a writer and a reader ("Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry."), so I thought I'd put a reading list together here in one place, based on her research and mine, to kick off inauguration week:
Fiction:
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (a favorite of John McCain's too)
- The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (I didn't know about that one)
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
- In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
- Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American by Graham Greene
- The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
Poetry:
- Collected Poems, 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott
- American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander (his inaugural poet)
Drama:
- Shakespeare's Tragedies
History:
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
- The Defining Moment: FDR's One Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter
- FDR by Jean Edward Smith
- Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
- Lincoln's speeches and writings (see volumes one and two)
- The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
- The Power Broker by Robert Caro
Essays and Autobiography:
- Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
- An Autobiography by Gandhi
- Working by Studs Terkel
- "Letter from Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King (find it collected here)
- The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Current Events:
- The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
- Ghost Wars by Steve Coll
- Unequal Democracy by Larry Bartels
- A Kind and Just Parent by William Ayers (yes, he even blurbed this for the Chicago Tribune in 1997)
Theology:
- The Bible (I'm not sure which edition he prefers, so I'm linking to this ecumenical one)
- Writings of Reinhold Niebuhr (a new edition of The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr is coming out in February)
- Confessions by St. Augustine
More to come for Inauguration week, including a new interview on Lincoln and Obama (and FDR and Darwin) with one of the authors listed above, Doris Kearns Goodwin. --Tom
P.S. Our friends at Shelfari have built their own Obama bookshelf, based in part on this article at Abebooks. Many books there that neither we nor the Times had, so I've filled in the list above.
dearieme on January 21, 2009 at 09:53 AM
Shakespeare and Smith are encouraging. Hayek would be good. Alas, reading Gibbon would be wise.
Liz985 on July 08, 2009 at 10:35 AM
Jeez, I have a more robust reading list from my undergrad days at UC Irvine. This guy is a Harvard grad?
delillo3 on July 14, 2009 at 11:04 PM
I am recommending as Presidential reading the following: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Hamid and Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas