The Times’s chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, recently sat down with President Obama to ask him about his life as a reader. During the course of the interview, the president praised several books and authors. And he talked about books that he had given his daughter Malia, including “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing, “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by Gabriel García Márquez and “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston. Here are a few other authors he singled out, along with some of his words about them.
Liu Cixin Mr. Obama called the author’s “The Three-Body Problem,” a three-volume science-fiction novel, “wildly imaginative, really interesting,” saying “the scope of it was immense.”
Junot Díaz and Jhumpa Lahiri Their books, Mr. Obama said, "speak to a very particular contemporary immigration experience. But also this combination of — that I think is universal — longing for this better place, but also feeling displaced and looking backwards at the same time. I think in that sense, their novels are directly connected to a lot of American literature.”
Gillian Flynn “There were books that would blend, I think, really good writing with thriller genres. I mean, I thought ‘Gone Girl’ was a well-constructed, well-written book.”
Lauren Groff Mr. Obama enjoyed Ms. Groff’s “really powerful” novel “Fates and Furies.”
Abraham Lincoln Mr. Obama said, “He is a very fine writer. I’d put the Second Inaugural up against any piece of American writing — as good as anything. One of the great treats of being president is, in the Lincoln Bedroom, there’s a copy of the Gettysburg Address handwritten by him, one of five copies he did for charity. And there have been times in the evening when I’d just walk over, because it’s right next to my office, my home office, and I just read it.”
Toni Morrison “‘Song of Solomon’ is a book I think of when I imagine people going through hardship. That it’s not just pain, but there’s joy and glory and mystery.”
V. S. Naipaul “His ‘A Bend in the River,’ which starts with the line, ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ And I always think about that line, and I think about his novels when I’m thinking about the hardness of the world sometimes, particularly in foreign policy, and I resist and fight against sometimes that very cynical, more realistic view of the world. And yet, there are times where it feels as if that may be true.”
Marilynne Robinson “We’ve become sort of pen pals,” Mr. Obama said. “I started reading her in Iowa, where ‘Gilead’ and some of her best novels are set. And I loved her writing in part because I saw those people every day.”
William Shakespeare “I took this wonderful Shakespeare class in college where I just started to read the tragedies and dig into them,” Mr. Obama said. “And that, I think, is foundational for me in understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings.”
Colson Whitehead Mr. Obama said that Mr. Whitehead’s most recent novel, “The Underground Railroad,” is a “reminder of the ways in which the pain of slavery transmits itself across generations, not just in overt ways, but how it changes minds and hearts.”
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