I guarantee that had Obama gave an interview and listed those as his favourite books you would have accused him of giving cliched answers and claimed that he probably hadn’t read any of them.
Actually, I bet you haven’t read any of them yourself. I bet your internet history shows a google search “famous books and authors…”
As a literate and well-educated gentleman with degrees from Columbia and Harvard, Obama figures that, like him, you’ve already read all of those.
You have, haven’t you?
I’ve only read about half of them but they are all very solidly in the Great Modern Literature pantheon.
I wonder if the OP has read a single one of them.
Imagine trump’s favorite books … if you care to. The only book I’m sure he’s read besides The Art of The Deal is Mein Kampf, apparently a favorite. I sure wish I was joking.
“There are some books, right over there.”
The Song of Solomon isn’t music?
flees
Yeah, right? I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t fit even within the rest of that list.
I probably shouldn’t talk – I’ve tried Gilead and The Woman Warrior multiple times and haven’t made it through them. :o
It’s nice that the OP is recommending that we all read Balzac and Shakespeare and all them other high-falutin’ Greeks. Wasn’t so long ago that a small-town librarian would be shunned for providing access to the “dirty books” written by Chaucer! Rabelais! and Bal-zac! I guess tastes have changed, even among conservatives, since the halcyon days of the 1910s. Leading us to wonder how you can be a “classic” today if you were a “dirty book” not so very long ago, and how it is that the canon of classics actually has changed over the years…
Worth noting is that despite being creations of the late twentieth century, both **Gilead **and Song of Solomon are very difficult to understand without a solid knowledge of the “classics”–in the case of Gilead, that includes particularly the Bible. For erudition, for depth of challenge to the reader, for understanding and illustration of the human condition, I would stack **Gilead **up against anything Hardy, Pushkin, or Milton ever wrote, to name three of the authors appearing on the OP’s list. (Maybe Balzac too. Scuse me for livin’ but I never read it.)
But if it wasn’t written by an author the OP had heard of before the age of 18 or so, an author widely acknowledged at the time as a master of the craft of writing, then it must not count as a classic or perhaps as any good at all. Such an odd and limited way of looking at literature. Poor OP!
I think the link within the link shows how brilliant and well-read the man is.
Here is what Obama said about that book:
That’s the scope of it. It was the part of the conversation that started with Obama saying “Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else” and the interviewer asking him about these “escapist” books that he reads for fun, to get away from his head.
Read the New York Times article linked for context. The headline is pure clickbait and not at all the “11 books President Obama thinks evereyone should read.” It’s “11 books Obama mentioned in a New York Time interview.”
[Treating the OP as serious] I was surprised I had only read 3 on the list. Thrillers are my escapist preference, and Gone Girl doesn’t fit in the top 10 - hell even the top 50 or 100 - even if we were restricted to that genre. Only reason I’d put it on any list was because it was such a popular phenomenon, so people could read for themselves what the buzz was about.
I wonder if the OP can read? I mean, come on, a fifth grader would have understood from the article that these are clearly NOT “11 books the president thinks everyone should read”.
I guess maybe it’s lack of reading comprehension really. But sheesh, have a little self respect. At least read enough of the article to get the damn title right!
Also I thought thread titles had to actually be descriptive. Whereas this one is purposely misleading.
How is a click bait title NOT considered trolling, I wonder?
[Moderating]
I think we’ve pretty well established by now that this thread is based on a false premise, so I’m just going to close it. I can’t tell whether the OP deliberately falsified the premise, or if he simply misunderstood the article he read, but either way, the effect is the same. If anyone wishes to continue any of the serious discussion that followed, please open a new thread with a non-poisoned well to do so.
That said:
You two have both been here long enough to know that accusations of lying and personal insults are both prohibited outside of the Pit.