Obama's Book Club: Beach Read Edition
Back when he was a candidate, Barack Obama revealed an Oprah-like ability to handsell the books he was reading, helping to boost books by Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Fred Kaplan into the top ranks of our bestseller lists. Now that he's president, will he still have the same magic touch? With the Obamas on Martha's Vineyard this week for their first family vacation since he took office, deputy press secretary Bill Burton mentioned some of the books that the president had brought along for beach reading (with their Amazon sales ranks when I first saw this story this morning):
- The Way Home, George Pelecanos (#33,349)
- Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Tom Friedman (#231)
- Lush Life, Richard Price (#4,232)
- Plainsong, Kent Haruf (#12,646)
- John Adams, David McCullough (#2,126)
The LA Times piece that first broadcast the picks mentioned that these were "among the lucky authors" Obama was reading, so it may be that Burton mentioned more, which we'll add here if he did. [P.S. The Daily News reports there were only five on the list.] We'll also keep an eye on Movers & Shakers to see if those rankings go higher over the next few days. But I'm don't know if a booklist announced by a spokesperson will have the same sales effect as a stylish photograph on the airport tarmac with the candidate's finger marking his place in a current-events bestseller.
Any tea leaves to read in the list? Well, the Pelecanos pick might mean he wants to read up on his new hometown, but seeing Price there too makes it more likely that he's just following a couple of the writers from The Wire, which he's said before he's a fan of. (Dennis Lehane must be saying, "Hey, what about me?") And I'm not sure what presidential historians would make of the John Adams choice, but that may be an HBO-driven pick too. The McCullough presidential bio that would really be telling would be Truman, whose misunderstood-at-the-time-but-celebrated-in-retrospect administration George W. Bush, like other presidents on the ropes, took some solace in late in his own tenure. Obama's approval ratings have taken a bit of a hit this summer, but I'm sure he's not quite ready for that one.
As a fellow Wire fan, it happens that I've interviewed both Pelecanos and Price about their books on the list, which you can listen to here:
--Tom
cd on September 26, 2009 at 04:13 AM
Awesome books, all three. I think he also wrote: The Burning of the Constitution" and "Obamunism, a new a worse form of Communism"