In his first book, “Dreams From My Father,” Barack Obama talks about how he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others. Some of his favorites are by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois. In college, he immersed himself in a spiritual-intellectual search and read the works of Nietzsche and St. Augustine.
What is he reading these days?
During a 60 Minutes interview in November Obama mentioned he’s reading two books about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Jonathan Alter’s “The Defining Moment: F.D.R’s Hundred Days,” and the Triumph of Hope, and Jean Edward Smith’s “FDR.”
The New York Times reported in May that he also was reading Doris Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World.”
And, here are some more titles Obama has read, according to McNally Jackson Books — a New York bookstore that opened in 2004 and describes itself as “a big, beautiful independent bookstore in New York’s Nolita, where Soho, Noho, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, and Little Italy meet (it’s also a stone’s throw from Tribeca, the East Village, West Village, and Wall Street…. Not to mention a quick subway ride from Brooklyn, a bike ride from Harlem, and a PATH fare from the great state of New Jersey). In other words, we’re right in the middle of the criss-crossing currents of New York’s eclectic cultural life and we’re determined to capture that invigorating swirl in our mix of books, media, and events.
How many of these Obama faves have you leafed through?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Benito Cereno by Herman Melville
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
The Bible
The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Cancer Ward by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson
The Confessions of St. Augustine
The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich
Exodus by Leon Uris
The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
Gandhi: An Autobiography
Gandhi’s Truth by Erik H. Erikson
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
Gilead by by Marilynne Robinson
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Hamlet by Shakespeare
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr
King Lear by Shakespeare
Loon Lake by E.L. Doctorow
Mila 18 by Leon Uris
Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr
My Life as a Man by Philip Roth
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
The Outsider by Richard Wright
Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Tar Baby by Toni Morrison
The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
Working by Studs Terkel
World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
