Barack Obama has made a tradition of sharing his summer reading list with the public every year. While literature fans are waiting for this year’s reveal, the Washington Post decided to see if they could predict which books the former president will be recommending this season.
In an article by Post books reporter Sophia Nguyen, contributors to the newspaper’s Book World section took a crack at forecasting Obama’s list. Nguyen notes that Obama’s varied taste in books make it difficult to predict.
“He doesn’t limit himself to a fixed number of titles, though his lists have recently grown longer,” Nguyen writes. “He favors new books, picking them up within about three years of publication—but not always.”
For fiction, the writers are guessing that Obama will give his imprimatur to novels including Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Demon Copperhead, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s buzzy Chain-Gang All-Stars, and the late Cormac McCarthy’s comparatively kinder and gentler novel All the Pretty Horses.
Obama is a bit of a nonfiction nerd, and the Post writers think he’ll express enthusiasm for titles such as Jonathan Eig’s biography King: A Life; Maud Newton’s genealogy memoir Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation; and David Remnick’s volume of “cool-dad criticism,” Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music.
The writers think there’s an outside chance that Obama will recognize Clint Smith’s latest poetry collection, Above Ground, but note that, at least in the past, the former president has been “strictly a prose guy.” (The current leader of the free world, on the other hand, loves his verse, particularly that of the Irish variety.)
Will the Book World crew’s predictions prove to be on target or off base? Only Obama knows for sure, and he hasn’t yet said when his 2023 list will drop.
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
