Reading list · 15 books
Barack Obama's reading list
Barack Obama served as the 44th President of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Since leaving office, he has posted annual summer and year-end reading lists on Instagram and Facebook, consistently drawing from literary fiction, American history, and books grappling with race, democracy, and civic life. His taste runs toward writers who combine narrative precision with moral seriousness — Marilynne Robinson, Colson Whitehead, Isabel Wilkerson — and toward journalists and social scientists doing on-the-ground reporting about inequality and injustice.
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01
Tara Westover
Featured in Obama's 2018 year-end list. Westover grew up in rural Idaho in an isolationist family that rejected medicine and formal schooling; this is the story of how she educated herself into Cambridge and Harvard. Obama noted it as one of the most extraordinary memoirs he had read.
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02
Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah
On Obama's 2017 year-end list. Noah's account of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is as much structural history as personal memoir — the crime of the title is that his very existence was illegal under apartheid law.
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03
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond
Obama recommended Desmond's Pulitzer-winning ethnography of eviction in Milwaukee on his 2017 reading list. Desmond embedded with landlords and tenants for years; the result makes the mechanics of housing poverty legible in a way that policy papers rarely can.
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04
Isabel Wilkerson
Obama has returned to Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration multiple times in interviews and speeches. Following three individuals from the Deep South to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles across fifty years, it remains the definitive narrative treatment of one of the largest internal migrations in American history.
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05
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates wrote this as an open letter to his teenage son about what it means to inhabit a Black body in America. Obama, still in office when the book appeared in 2015, praised Coates's moral clarity and willingness to refuse comforting narratives about American progress.
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06
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Bryan Stevenson
On Obama's 2019 year-end list. Stevenson, a lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, uses Walter McMillian's wrongful death-row conviction as the spine of a broader argument about the failures of the American criminal legal system. Obama called it a book that should be required reading.
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07
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson
Featured on Obama's 2020 year-end list. Wilkerson's second major project argues that American race relations are best understood through the concept of caste — a fixed hierarchy maintained through eight pillars — and draws comparisons to India's caste system and Nazi Germany's racial laws.
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08
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi
Kendi's National Book Award-winning history traces the intellectual genealogy of racist ideas in America from Cotton Mather through present-day policy debates. Obama included it as essential context for understanding that racial inequality is not an accident or a holdover but the intended result of specific arguments and decisions.
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09
Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
Suzanne Simard
Obama picked Powers's Pulitzer-winning novel for his 2019 list. Nine Americans are drawn together through their connections to trees; the book works as both literary fiction and as an argument about environmental time scales that dwarf human attention spans.
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10
David Grann
On Obama's 2017 list. Grann reconstructs the systematic murder of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma — orchestrated by white settlers who had married into families to inherit oil rights — and the FBI investigation that followed. The institutional failure documented here has echoes Obama drew out in a discussion of law enforcement accountability.
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11
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Obama recommended this Harvard political scientists' comparative study on his 2018 list, calling it a bracing read for anyone worried about democratic erosion. Levitsky and Ziblatt examine how elected leaders in Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and Peru undermined democratic norms from within, often without a single dramatic rupture.
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12
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
Keefe's account of the murder of Jean McConville during the Troubles — and the decades-long effort to understand who ordered it — appeared on Obama's 2019 list. It is as much a study in how political violence warps memory and community as it is a work of crime reportage.
- Gilead
13
Gilead
Marilynne Robinson
Obama's admiration for Robinson is well-documented: he conducted a lengthy interview with her for the New York Review of Books in 2015. This novel — a dying Iowa pastor's letter to his young son — exemplifies what Obama has described as fiction that can hold complexity and doubt alongside faith and love.
- The Underground Railroad
14
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel imagines the Underground Railroad as a literal network of tunnels and trains, allowing Cora's escape from a Georgia plantation to become a tour through alternate American histories. Obama recommended it in 2016 for its capacity to defamiliarize a history that risks becoming abstraction.
- A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
15
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders
On Obama's 2021 year-end list. Saunders's book grew from his Syracuse MFA course on Russian short fiction — Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol — and works as both a craft manual and a sustained argument about why fiction that looks honestly at human suffering matters.
More on Barack Obama's picks
Obama's reading lists arrive twice a year — summer picks around July, year-end roundups in December — and they have become unusually influential, regularly moving books onto bestseller lists. The pattern across years is consistent: he gravitates toward books that take seriously the gap between American ideals and American reality.
Several threads run through this list. One is the literature of witness: memoirs and reported narratives — Tara Westover, Bryan Stevenson, Matthew Desmond — that put specific lives inside structural problems. Another is historical reckoning, from Isabel Wilkerson's two sweeping projects on the Great Migration and the architecture of caste to Patrick Radden Keefe's granular reconstruction of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. A third is literary fiction that reaches toward the same moral terrain: Colson Whitehead's alternate-history of slavery, Marilynne Robinson's Iowa-set meditations on grace and doubt.
What connects them is an insistence on looking squarely at difficult things — racism, poverty, sectarian violence, democratic backsliding — without either melodrama or evasion. Obama has talked in interviews and in his memoir about reading as a way of inhabiting perspectives he couldn't otherwise access. The books here do exactly that.
