What do Obama’s Book Picks Say About Him
Does he actually read them? What traits do the books share?
“Biggest” News in Books: Obama’s Reading Lists
Last week I read an interesting article pondering the question of whether Barack Obama really reads and picks all of the books that he chooses for his annual list of reading recommendations. Obviously, this list is a big deal for publishing: when the former leader of the free world intentionally takes time to talk about books, it’s one of the top five pieces of news for the year in our business. The publicist who works on Obama’s books swears that Obama picks all the books himself. It’s not a “team led exercise” someone from his team says (using that old homespun political-dad-logic that “it wouldn’t pass the smell test”). This same advisor also offers important clarity into the process, saying that the list “reflects the inputs that he has.”
For the record, I truly do believe he reads and picks all of the books. Do I think there is more input than him just looking back at his Goodreads list and writing down his favorites? Certainly. Whether Obama is still your guy or not, there is no doubting that he was a fan of committees, and thinking his decisions through a thousand times over before making a move. From how he reads to the eventual picks, there’s no possible way he’s doing it without “inputs” and some of those inputs might be other people. Still, committee or not, there’s no doubting that he puts a lot of thought into how each pick and the list as a whole will reflect on him.
And who wouldn’t? I was once asked to list my five favorite books for a biographical exercise and I agonized about it for days. Of course, I didn’t pick my absolute favorite books at that moment in time, I carefully selected five books from a list of favorites but that also represented a breadth of my interests so I didn’t look like a psychopath who had only read two authors. So, it’s with that methodology that we’re going to look for common themes among Obama’s picks and see if we can’t define his style a little bit, or at least what he looks to say about himself with his cross sections of choices.
First, all of the lists, in case you’re curious:
Big Smart Books
It’s natural to think Obama and assume the list will reflect his political leanings. And there’s certainly an amount of social consciousness in the lists (it’s kind of hard not to have this in a list of good books), but the picks at their core are not very politics or history heavy at all. Not what you’d typically expect from a man in his 60s with a law degree who worked in government his entire life. Though I’m sure anyone who didn’t vote for him will see a highly politicized list no matter what.
So, yes, you have a Samuel Adams book and South to America (a history book that has “the Soul of a Nation” in its subtitle) on his 2022 list, but that’s just two of the thirteen books. The year before, you can certainly ascribe politics to some of the books but there’s no out-and-out policy book at all. He picks a lot of fiction and memoir. The fact that the lists are not political even though he is a politician is not really surprising if you stop to consider we’re talking about the “there’s no red states or blue states” guy.
To the eyes of a publishing professional, the thing that stands out is that these are a diverse slate of “big books”. Just looking at last year’s list, these are books that, if you are working in publishing, you know about even if you haven’t read them. The average reader might not notice, but they are the kinds of books that were bought for a lot of money and were pushed heavily by publishers. A good portion of these can be found at the top of the list of lists that we’ve looked at a few times at Dear Head of Mine—the one compiles the count for how many times something was named “best of” by various lists. Among these books, there are two National Book Award winners, multiple Read with Jenna picks, NYT’s 100 Books of the Year, former Pulitzer Prize winning authors, etc. etc. etc. And this type of gold-medal-winning pedigree is consistent across the Obama book picks. They are fairly high brow, non-controversially smart and literary, popular and widely covered books. There is a reason the guy won two presidential elections: he knows mass appeal.
But do these books represent him?
In a way, yes, but the picks express not his political leanings or his taste in literature as much as his ability to always play it cool and sense the cultural temperature. Let’s face it: Obama’s book lists are smart hipster picks, popular but not too popular, unassailably good in quality, award-winning, generally well-liked stuff. Like a playlist at an upscale coffee shop in Brooklyn. Even the basketball books he chooses—this being the most outwardly-facing, normal-guy hobby he’s had over the years—are all the basketball books that had already broken out in the category, all New York Times bestsellers, at the top of a niche if you will.
What Obama projects with these lists all adds up to something that is ultimately…safe. In the way that hipster cultural touchstones exist on a shelf right below the plateau of commerciality—popular but not popcorn. So, if there is a way in which his list encompasses his role as a politician, it is this kind of inherit lack of risk taking in order not to alienate anyone. This safety is why I assume publishing and non-publishing people alike question if these books really represent what he likes best from any given year, and if he chooses them all by himself. While the list is undeniably cool and culturally in touch, it also feels somewhat affected, even if Obama’s natural charm and easy humor makes you forget this most of the time.
Obama’s accompanying movie and music lists also support this cool-but-safe-guy picks theory. Honestly, we have little reason to be suspicious in books compared to music—SZA and Bad Bunny? Stats that show we basically lose our ability to discover music in our 30s, and I can attest to this as many of these artists and songs are alien to me at this point. As far as one-man-chose-this validity, it doesn’t really past the vaunted “smell test.”
If you work in books—and this is the beauty of the job—you’re going to read some random stuff that you will to fall in love with. Voracious readers get distracted and try out things for a number of arbitrary reasons. A real favorite books of the year list is going to have at least one thing that isn’t “best of” or prize-winning, important or even popular. The yearning, nagging question is, therefore: does Barack Obama always just happen to like what is top of the cultural heap—but not basic—every year in film, music, and books? Unlikely.
Final Thoughts
Authenticity shouldn’t be the only measure. That’s not something you can promise when you put out a list knowing that dozens of your friends or co-workers will pay attention to it, let alone tens of millions of people. Don’t you think your list would come off a little overly careful and curated if you did this excercise? There are no legitimate complaints to be made here, even if they aren’t the most exciting, unexpected or idiosyncratic of picks. It is a good thing if Obama’s list inspires people to pay attention to book news and read more books, even if they’re just the ones that have been all of the news and already won prizes.