Former President Barack Obama released his annual summer reading list on Twitter, highlighting nine books that he’s spending the season with.
Obama’s list is heavy on fiction, with six novels making the cut. He endorsed Dennis Lehane’s latest thriller, Small Mercies, along with another crime novel, S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed.
He picked two debut novels: DK Nnuro’s What Napoleon Could Not Do and Tiffany Clarke Harrison’s Blue Hour. Rounding out his fiction selections were Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful and Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood.
Three of Obama’s selections were nonfiction: Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life; Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, by America; and David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
Obama’s announcement comes a little more than two weeks after Washington Post writers tried to predict which books would appear on the former president’s list. So how did they do? Pretty well: the D.C. crew correctly anticipated that Obama would include the books by Nnuro, Desmond, Eig, and Lehane.
Authors included on Obama’s list reacted to their endorsements on social media. On Twitter, Napolitano wrote, “This is unbelievable, and a thrill,” while Grann tweeted, “So honored that The Wager is included on @BarackObama’s summer reading list, and to be among such remarkable company.”
And on Instagram, Harrison wrote, “I have been crying and shaking and shouting Ohmygodohmygodohmygod for the last hour…Thank you @barackobama for the joy and honor of being on your summer reading list. Now I’m going to eat chicken nuggets from Trader Joe’s and drink ginger ale while soaking up the wild amount of joy from the fact that I just wrote the above sentence.”
Here’s some books that I’m reading this summer. Check them out and let me know what I should be reading next. pic.twitter.com/zMBNwX2qUW
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 20, 2023
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.