Barack Obama's Reading List: Books the President Recommends Every Year

Every December, Barack Obama releases a list of books he read over the past year. What began as a social media habit has become one of the most-watched reading lists in the world — not because Obama is a former president, but because his selections are genuinely surprising, consistently excellent, and span far wider than the typical politician’s bookshelf.

Obama reads literary fiction alongside cutting-edge social science. He picks up debut novelists and Nobel laureates with equal enthusiasm. He reads books that challenge his own worldview, and he says so publicly. The result is a reading list that functions as both a cultural barometer and a reliable guide to books worth your time.

Here are the recurring favourites and standout picks from Obama’s annual recommendations.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama

Before diving into what Obama reads, it’s worth mentioning what he wrote. A Promised Land — the first volume of his presidential memoir — is a book about the nature of power, the gap between idealism and governance, and the weight of decisions made at 3am in the Situation Room.

Obama writes with unusual self-awareness about his own limitations and mistakes, which makes the memoir more valuable than the triumphalist variety. It’s a long book, but it earns its length.

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Obama has repeatedly pointed readers toward his wife’s memoir, and for good reason — it is the better-written of the two Obama memoirs. Michelle’s voice is sharper and more personal, and her account of growing up on Chicago’s South Side, navigating Princeton, and eventually inhabiting the White House is consistently compelling.

It also provides an essential counterpoint to Barack’s more policy-focused memoir: the same events, seen from a different vantage point.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Obama included Sapiens on multiple reading lists and praised Harari’s ability to compress enormous stretches of human history into coherent, thought-provoking arguments. The book asks big questions about what makes humans unique, why Homo sapiens survived while other human species did not, and how the stories we tell ourselves — about money, nations, and religion — are the actual operating system of civilisation.

Whatever your quibbles with the book’s ambition, it is the rare work of popular history that makes you see the present differently.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s magisterial account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the Jim Crow South to the cities of the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important American history books of the past two decades. Obama has cited it as a work that helped him understand a fundamental reshaping of American society that most history books barely mention.

The book follows three individuals across three decades, using personal narrative to make a vast demographic movement viscerally real.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Written as a letter to his teenage son, Coates’s short, urgent book is about the experience of living in a Black body in America — the constant awareness of vulnerability, the limits of the American Dream as sold, and the history that produced the present. Obama has praised it as a book that makes readers uncomfortable in exactly the right way.

It is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one, and at 150 pages it demands no excuses.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

When Obama praised this novel — George Saunders’s debut in the form — it promptly sold out on Amazon. The book imagines President Lincoln’s grief after his young son Willie dies in 1862, told through the voices of dozens of ghosts occupying the graveyard where Willie is buried.

It is structurally bizarre, historically grounded, and genuinely moving. Obama called it one of the most original novels he’d read in years. He was right.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Obama has spoken of One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the novels that shaped his thinking — not a recent discovery but a formative text. He read García Márquez in college, and the book’s exploration of family, myth, memory, and the cyclical nature of history left a visible imprint on his own writing style.

If you haven’t read it, Obama’s enthusiasm is as good a reason as any to start. The novel follows seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo — a story that is at once intimate and cosmic.

James by Percival Everett

Obama selected Everett’s 2024 novel — a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim — as one of his standout reads. The novel reframes one of the most celebrated books in American literature by restoring the voice and interiority of the character who, in the original, exists primarily to serve Huck’s journey.

It is a brilliant act of literary reclamation, and it arrives with the full weight of Everett’s decades-long career behind it.

Think Again by Adam Grant

Among the social science books Obama recommends, Adam Grant’s Think Again stands out for its focus on intellectual humility — the capacity to update your beliefs when confronted with new evidence. For a former president reflecting on the gap between campaign promises and governing reality, it’s an apt recommendation.

Grant argues that the most effective thinkers are those who approach their own convictions with the scepticism of a scientist. It’s a readable, well-researched case for changing your mind.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

Obama praised Verghese’s sprawling multigenerational novel set across three generations of a family in Kerala, India. The book spans from 1900 to 1977 and is rooted in Verghese’s experience as a physician — themes of medicine, family, and the long shadow of the past run through every chapter.

It is old-fashioned literary fiction in the best sense: patient, deeply researched, and populated with characters you genuinely care about.

What Makes Obama’s Reading List Worth Following

Three things distinguish Obama’s recommendations from the typical celebrity reading list.

Range. In any given year, Obama might recommend a debut literary novel, a work of African history, a social psychology study, and a children’s book. He is genuinely curious across domains, and it shows.

Diversity of perspective. Obama consistently reads — and recommends — books by writers whose experiences differ from his own. The list skews toward voices that are underrepresented in mainstream literary culture.

Honesty about difficulty. Obama doesn’t only recommend books he found uplifting. He recommends books that challenged him, disturbed him, and made him reconsider assumptions. That’s a harder editorial standard than most curators apply.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books does Barack Obama read per year?

Obama has said he reads between 15 and 25 books per year during his presidency, and more since leaving office. He reads across fiction, history, science, and philosophy.

Does Obama prefer fiction or non-fiction?

Both — genuinely. His annual lists consistently include literary fiction alongside history, biography, and social science. He has said that fiction develops empathy in ways non-fiction cannot replicate.

Where can I find Obama’s full annual reading lists?

Obama posts his reading lists on his social media accounts (Instagram and Facebook) each December. He also sometimes mentions books in interviews and podcast appearances throughout the year.

Affiliate disclosure: Links on this site are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This does not influence our editorial recommendations.