President Obama is on his nine day vacation on Martha’s Vineyard with his wife Michelle and their two daughters. Obama is known for having good taste in books, because he has read Netherland by Joseph O’Neil and Freedom by Jonathan Franzen for his past summer vacations. This time he brought almost all novels. Unlike past presidents, Obama picks are serious literary fiction novels.
Winter’s Bone author Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy, is a trio of “Country Noir” novels. Rodin’s Debutante by Ward Just is a coming of age boarding school tale in postwar era Chicago, where Obama started his political career.
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is about twin boys in Ethiopia raised by an Indian nun, one of whom turns out to be a doctor. He could be reading this because Obama lived in Africa for a little while as a child, Kenya not Ethiopia, before moving back to the U.S. To the End of the Land by David Grossman is a book about war in Israel and the relationship between a woman and her two sons, each fathered by different men. The subject of a war forcing people to separate them from their families is an important one right now.
President Obama does have a nonfiction book on his reading list: Pulitzer Prize Winner Isabel Wilkerson’s A Warmth of Other Suns, about the migration of black southerners to the North and Midwest. It looks like Obama has some good reading material for his days on Martha’s Vineyard.
For his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard this week, President Barack Obama has packed a long list of books to read.