Three Books Recommended by Obama That I Read and Loved

And why they deserve to be on everybody’s TBR List

A few years ago I stumbled upon an article in which Barack Obama recommended some of his favourite books. I had no idea before this that the former president was a reading aficionado and this fact alone made me curious enough to want to try some of his choices. I, therefore, picked some titles I had never heard of before (fiction books, as I enjoy them more than non-fiction ones) and braced myself to see what I was getting into.

Some hundreds of pages later, I realized how happy I was with the choices that I had made and I was amazed at how much I resonated with some of these books. I mean, come on, what were the odds that I would have such similar reading tastes to the former president?

So here are three books that he enjoyed and I would like to further recommend as, who knows, you might (really) like them too:

“Fates and Furies”, by Lauren Groff

“Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets.” (Goodreads)

This was Obama’s favourite read in 2015 and it quickly became one of my favourites. It is a book about relationships and their quirks. It has a very original structure, but I cannot say much about it as it is better to just delve into this one without knowing much about it. It just makes the impact greater. It suffices to say that this book makes you ask yourself a lot of questions. To what extent do we get to know the other person we are in a relationship with? Can we be 100% honest with our partners all the time? Is that even healthy? What thoughts might be crossing their mind?

Some quotes I liked:

“Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.’’

“Paradox of marriage: you can never know someone entirely; you do know someone entirely.’’

“Exhalation”, by Ted Chiang

“In these nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories, Ted Chiang tackles some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine.” (Goodreads)

Have you seen “Arrival”? I saw it some years ago in the cinema and I thought it was simply brilliant. I raved about it for months and when I saw that Obama was recommending a book written by the same guy who had written the story on which this movie had been based, I picked this one up as well. I don’t normally read a lot of SF’s as I prefer other types of books, but having seen “Arrival” acted like a strong incentive. And I really am so glad it did.

This is a book of short stories and, as in all the cases with volumes of this kind, some stories are just better than others. However, the mind-bending concepts really make one appreciate the whole volume.

This is an excerpt from what I wrote on Goodreads immediately after finishing the volume:

“Take Black Mirror, make it a lot more focused on what makes us humane rather than on the dystopic and negative aspects of technology, add a tad of hope, some conundrums about the universe, and some anthropological issues and you’ll get the gist of what this volume has to offer. All this and some alternative histories. I’m telling you, some of the concepts from these stories are pure genius.”

Some quotes I liked:

“Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories, we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”

“Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of the graveyard.”

“How to Read the Air”, by Dinaw Mengestu

“A heartbreaking literary masterwork about love, family, and the power of imagination, which confirms Mengestu’s reputation as one of the brightest talents of his generation.” (Goodreads)

If you might have heard of the first two authors, I am pretty sure that you have not heard of this one. This book has quiet undertones of melancholy and sadness. It talks about family and about the history of a family of Ethiopian immigrants, about love, and about the power of imagination. It talks about estrangement. It talks about how no breakup means a clear-cut ending and how a divorce cannot really bring a clearly outlined termination to a connection between two people. But most importantly, it talks about the prints we leave on other people’s lives and about the ripples that our very existence makes.

Some quotes I liked:

“There is nothing so easily remade as our definitions of ourselves.”

“That was the first important step away from me that she made, and I knew that there would be others, and that many of them would be small, hardly even perceptible, which is the way distance between two people normally grows — in baby-step-sized increments.’’

Well, if you are on the lookout for new reads and if you are curious to see what kind of books Obama likes to read, I recommend you start with these. Who knows, you might be the next in line to recommend them to someone else.

Also, have you read any of the other books the former president has recommended over the years? If you did, which one(s)? I would just love to hear more about your experience with them, so if you feel like sharing anything on the subject, I would be delighted to read about it.