86 Books Barack Obama Recommended During His Presidency

The entries were pulled from places like Obama’s summer reading lists, his childhood favorites, and recommendations made for his daughter, Malia. They include plenty of classics such as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as many contemporary works. And, of course, he made time to brush up on the lives of his predecessors, reading biographies of John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. In an interview with WIRED last year, President Obama cited several titles that significantly shaped him, including: The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln; The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro; The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin; Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow; Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari; Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman; The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert; In Dubious Battle by John Steinbeck; and Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo. They’re just a fraction of the full list, but WIRED calculated that it would take the typical reader 89 hours to get through those 10 books alone. Let’s see if you can finish all 86 in time for our country’s next Inauguration Day. 1. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer 2. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez 3. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing 4. The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston 5. Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson 6. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 7. Nora Webster, Colm Toibin 8. The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson 9. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos 10. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Dr. Atul Gawande 11. Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, Katherine Rundell 12. The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan 13. Redwall series, Brian Jacques 14. Junie B. Jones series, Barbara Park 15. Nuts To You, Lynn Rae Perkins 16. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, William Finnegan 17. H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald 18. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins 19. Seveneves, Neal Stephenson 20. The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead 21. All That Is, James Salter 22. The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert 23. The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri 24. Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates 25. Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow 26. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr 27. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson 28. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck 29. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald 30. Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak 31. Moby Dick, Herman Melville 32. Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson 33. Song Of Solomon, Toni Morrison 34. Parting The Waters, Taylor Branch 35. Gilead, Marylinne Robinson 36. Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam 37. The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton 38. Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois 39. The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene 40. The Quiet American, Graham Greene 41. Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 42. Gandhi’s autobiography 43. Working, Studs Terkel 44. Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 45. Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith 46. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren 47. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese 48. To the End of the Land, David Grossman 49. Purity, Jonathan Franzen 50. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipau 51. Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff 52. Lush Life, Richard Price 53. Netherland, Joseph O’Neill 54. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Salman Rushdie 55. Redeployment, Phil Klay 56. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison 57. Plainsong, Kent Haruf 58. The Way Home, George Pelecanos 59. What Is the What, Dave Eggers 60. Philosophy & Literature, Peter S. Thompson 61. Collected Poems, Derek Walcott 62. In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck 63. Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn 64. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin 65. Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling 66. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris 67. John Adams, David McCullough 68. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, Fred Kaplan 69. Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alte 70. FDR, Jean Edward Smith 71. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin 72. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 73. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America, Thomas L. Friedman 74. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll 75. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels 76. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Robert A. Caro 77. Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Evan Osnos 78. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman 79. Moral Man And Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr 80. A Kind And Just Parent, William Ayers 81. The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria 82. Lessons in Disaster, Gordon Goldstein 83. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari 84. The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin 85. Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American, Richard S. Tedlow 86. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo THESE INSPIRING BOOKS [Cover pictures+Reviews] ARE NOW GLEANED IN PDF FORMAT AND DELIVERED INTO YOUR INBOX FOR $86.