Here’s his list of what he considers essential books.
I suppose it reflects our post-literate age but what a sad list. (And I’m not particularly getting at Obama, Trump’s would have been far worse.)
No classics of Western and world civilization, no Iliad, no Aeneid, no Arabian Nights, no Dante or Ariosto or Tasso, nothing by Montaigne or Shakespeare or Milton, no Henry Fielding, no Goethe, no Jane Austen, no Stendhal, no Pushkin, no Dickens, no Balzac, no Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, no George Eliot or Thomas Hardy.
One might say Obama is sticking to modern books. I don’t think that’s true, I just think that he has either never read the classics or couldn’t appreciate them when he tried and I think that’s probably true of most of our politicians these days. The age of the well-read and erudite political class is over. And that is indeed sad.
Oh wow, another Obama bashing thread by aldiboronti, shocker!
It’s funny, that list was distilled from an interview where Obama discusses reading a shit ton of classics. I guess you’re too busy reading Tolstoy to click a link though.
Also, those aren’t a list of 10 books Obama is recommending everyone read. Good job lying about that in the title. They’re just ones he mentioned in an interview.
Actually, I think it says the exact opposite of what you suggest. It would be trivially easy for President Obama to recite a list of classics that everyone should read. Everyone is familiar with the broad outlines of those books so he could fake familiarity even if he had never read any of them. No one would question his taste if he had suggested only Shakespeare. It takes a well-read person to have an informed opinion about a wide range of contemporary literature and be willing to offer those opinions for scrutiny. He’ll stand behind those books because he knows and loves them. It’s what makes him well-read and erudite.
Yeah, I sometimes have problems with answering a thread by taking it at face value. I don’t know what my 11 list would be, but Hundred Years of Solitude has a good shot of being on it, battling it out with Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie) and Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) for my magical realism pick. Hell, maybe I’d even put all three on there (though I probably would have to settle for one to make room for others. In that case, Bulgakov is probably my pick.) At any rate, works for post-literate folks these are not.
Cool. I have a few of these on my read list this year anyway…in fact, I finished a book last night and “Three-Body Problem” is sitting at home waiting to be cracked this evening.
As usual, aldiboronti gets it all wrong. I read the source–in the New York Times. This is apparently a Kindle list he’s given to his daughter–things that “might not surface when she goes to college.” Of course he’s educated & has read the classics. (Has our OP read them all?)
Obama also mentions reading the “Gettysburg Address” (in Lincoln’s handwriting) displayed in the Lincoln bedroom. And many other books & authors who have touched him.
We’ll miss him. (Well, we’ll miss having him in the White House. He’s not going away.)
Yeah, digging into the article, I have no idea how they get the headline (clickbait!) from the story they source. It’s just Obama sitting down with a New York Times book critic talking about literature. It’s not even clear to me that all those books are on the Kindle he gave to his daughter. Four of them definitely are, but the others on the list just seem to be books mentioned in the interview as answers to various questions.
That is a surprisingly good list, which points up some great works that are usually overlooked. I’d say that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the equal of any book in the traditional pantheon and Song of Solomon is better than quite a few “classic” novels. I also think his focus is on newer works; the idea that literature stopped being good after the 19th century is nonsense.