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Every summer, Barack Obama does the thing your most well-read friend does: he posts a list of everything great he’s been reading and quietly wrecks your to-be-read pile. He drops one set of picks in the summer and a bigger favorites-of-the-year roundup each December, and somewhere along the way it became the closest thing America has to a national book club. No membership, no monthly fee, just a former president with genuinely good taste telling you what to read next.
His 2026 summer list just dropped, and it’s a strong one: eleven books running from Tayari Jones’s Oprah-blessed Louisiana saga Kin to Michael Pollan turning his restless curiosity on consciousness itself, with a Colson Whitehead heist and a George Saunders ghost story in between. You’ll find all eleven up top, then his year-end Favorite Books and last summer’s list right below, so nothing’s lost. We’ve written a quick, honest take on every single one, and every title has a button to check the price at Amazon and at Bookshop.org, the one that supports independent bookstores, so you can grab it wherever you prefer.
Our Top 3 to Start With
Obama’s 2026 Summer Reading List
The eleven books he’s reading this summer, from an Oprah-pick Louisiana family saga to a Michael Pollan mind-bender.
1
Tayari Jones
Historical FictionOprah’s Book Club
Tayari Jones wrote An American Marriage, the last novel of hers Obama loved, so Kin landing on this list is no surprise. It follows Vernice and Annie, two motherless girls growing up next door in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, whose lives split in wildly different directions as they chase love and belonging in an unjust America. It’s an exuberant, big-hearted saga about friendship, sisterhood, and the pull of where you come from. Oprah picked it too, so consider it doubly blessed.
🎯 Why We Picked ItIt’s the rare literary novel that reads like a page-turner, and it’s already a New York Times best book of the year so far.
2
Elizabeth Strout
Literary FictionBooker Longlist
Strout won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge, and here she steps outside her usual Lucy Barton universe for a standalone. Artie Dam is a beloved Massachusetts high school history teacher who looks perfectly content, right up until a chance incident and a long-buried secret force him to rethink the whole shape of his life. It’s quiet, compassionate, and quietly devastating in the way only Strout can pull off. At 224 pages it’s a one-weekend read that lingers for weeks.
💬 Our TakeLonglisted for the Booker, and a perfect entry point if you’ve somehow never read her before.
3
Michael Pollan
Big IdeasMind-Expanding
Pollan changed how people think about food, then about psychedelics, and now he turns that same curious lens on consciousness itself. He hunts for the first flicker of awareness everywhere it might hide, from plant neurobiology labs to scientists trying to build feelings into AI. It’s the kind of book that feels like a run of fascinating dinner-party facts while you’re reading it, then quietly rewires how you see your own mind for months after. Eye-opening in the most literal sense.
🎯 Why We Picked ItIf How to Change Your Mind lived in your head rent-free, this is the sequel your brain’s been waiting for.
4
Ann Patchett
Literary FictionFrom ‘Tom Lake’
Patchett follows the beloved Tom Lake with another warm, luminous family novel. When Daphne and her husband spot an older man trailing them through the Met, he turns out to be Eddie, the stepfather who was married to her mother for barely a year when she was nine, and the happiest part of her childhood. What unfolds is a tender story about memory, reconciliation, and the small moments that quietly define a life. It’s the loveliest kind of summer read.
📌 Worth KnowingA Katie Couric Book Club pick, and yes, there’s a horse named Whistler you’ll come to love.
5
Beverly Gage
HistoryPulitzer Winner
Gage won the Pulitzer for G-Man, her doorstop biography of J. Edgar Hoover, and here she does something looser and more fun: a road trip through American history. She visits thirteen places where the country argues with itself about its own past, from Philadelphia to Disneyland to a nuclear silo, timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. It’s part travelogue, part history lesson, and completely absorbing. She makes the case that you can look our messy history dead in the eye and still love the place.
👀 Heads UpPerfect road-trip listening for a summer that happens to be America’s semiquincentennial.
6
George Saunders
Literary Fiction#1 NYT Bestseller
The Booker-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo returns to the space between life and death. We spend the final hours at the bedside of K.J. Boone, a powerful oil-company CEO who insists he has nothing to regret, as a newly minted guide named Doll arrives to ferry him onward. It’s playful, strange, and ultimately a wily indictment of greed and greenwashing dressed up as a ghost story. Think A Christmas Carol for the climate era, pure Saunders.
🎯 Why We Picked ItA slim, dazzling novel critics are calling even better than Bardo, which is saying something.
7
Camille Bordas
Short StoriesNew Yorker Best
George Saunders calls Bordas an invaluable new voice, and this first collection shows why. Her stories go to the quiet pressure points of ordinary life: a woman taking stock after a burglary, a teenager obsessed with the obituaries, grandkids mourning the grandparents who loved them and the ones who didn’t. They’re mordantly funny and deeply humane, the kind that don’t so much end as keep unfolding inside you. Many first ran in The New Yorker, and it shows.
💬 Our TakeOne of the New Yorker’s and Esquire’s best books of the year so far, and a masterclass in the short form.
8
Vincent Yu
Literary FictionDiscover Prize Winner
One ordinary morning, every phone in a small Massachusetts town lights up at once with a ballistic-missile alert that is not a drill. For nineteen terrifying minutes before the all-clear, the residents of Beckitt are stripped down to their truest selves, and Yu’s dazzling debut follows the fallout for years afterward. It’s a heartfelt, cinematic look at what we do when we think we’re out of time, and whether we can live with those choices. Inspired by a real false alarm.
✨ Good to KnowWinner of the 2026 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and a stunning first novel.
9
Roopika Risam
Big IdeasHistory of Now
Historians love to name the engine of human history: guns, germs, steel, religion. The Dartmouth scholar Risam makes a bracing case that it was really data all along. She traces eleven thousand years of keeping track, from Paleolithic cave marks and Mesopotamian clay tallies to colonial censuses and today’s algorithmic surveillance state. It’s sweeping, provocative, and urgently relevant, and it reframes the tech headlines you’re already doomscrolling.
👀 Heads UpFor readers of Nexus and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism who want the very long view.
10
Ben Lerner
Literary FictionOrwell Prize Winner
Lerner’s slim, electric new novel hinges on a beautifully small disaster. A writer travels to Providence to conduct the final interview with his ninety-year-old mentor, drops his phone in the hotel sink on the way, and then can’t quite bring himself to admit he has no way to record a word. From there it becomes a funny, dreamlike meditation on memory, technology, and the people who shape us. It’s the kind of book you can finish in an afternoon and turn over for weeks.
🎯 Why We Picked ItWon the Orwell Prize and a New York Times best-of-the-year nod, all in 144 pages.
11
Colson Whitehead
Literary Fiction2x Pulitzer Winner
The two-time Pulitzer winner closes out his Harlem Trilogy in dazzling style, jumping to 1980s New York as the city claws out of ruin on a wave of real estate money and Reagan-era greed. Furniture dealer and reformed fence Ray Carney swears he’s done with the criminal life, until the banks stiff his wife’s travel-agency dream and he signs on for one last heist. It’s a heist novel, a love letter to a vanished city, and a sly meditation on reinvention all at once. Critics are calling it the best New York novel in years.
💬 Our TakeYou don’t need to have read Harlem Shuffle or Crook Manifesto first, but you’ll want to after.
Obama's Favorite Books of the Year
His December year-end list, the best of everything he read all year, from a Pulitzer-winning report to a novel by Michelle.
12
Beth Macy
MemoirFrom ‘Dopesick’
You know Beth Macy from Dopesick, the book that put the opioid crisis on America’s nightstand. Here she turns the lens on herself, going home to Urbana, Ohio to untangle her own family’s story of work, class, and the widening gap she spent a whole career reporting on. It reads like memoir and dispatch at once, tender about her late mother and clear-eyed about how a country quietly leaves people behind.
🎯 Why We Picked ItObama’s got a soft spot for books that explain the American divide through real people, and Macy puts her own family in the frame.
13
Susan Choi
Literary FictionWomen’s Prize Shortlist
A ten-year-old girl is found barely alive on a beach. Her father, who couldn’t swim and was last seen carrying a flashlight, has vanished. From there Susan Choi (yes, the Trust Exercise one) opens the story outward across decades and continents, into a Korean father raised in Japan, an estranged American mother, and the family silences that shape a kid more than any single fact ever could. It’s the kind of literary mystery that keeps quietly rearranging what you think happened.
👀 Heads UpIt jumps across timelines and narrators, so give it your full attention in the early chapters. Once the pieces click, it flies.
14
Jill Lepore
HistoryBig-Canvas History
Harvard historian Jill Lepore treats the U.S. Constitution not as a sacred relic under glass but as a living, contested, endlessly-argued-over document. She traces how ‘We the People’ has been fought over, amended, ignored, and reinvented for more than two centuries. If your civics class made the Constitution sound like homework, Lepore makes it read like the most important family argument in American history, which is basically what it’s always been.
💬 Our TakeIf you liked her sweeping These Truths, this is the same big-canvas, sharp-sentence energy aimed at a single document.
15
Angela Flournoy
Literary FictionKirkus Prize Finalist
Flournoy’s first novel since The Turner House was worth the decade-long wait. The Wilderness follows a group of Black women friends across roughly twenty years, tracking motherhood, art, ambition, and the friendships that outlast every bad apartment and worse relationship. Nobody writes the small negotiations of a long friendship quite like this, the group threads, the quiet resentments, the showing up anyway.
🎯 Why We Picked ItA Kirkus Prize finalist and a rare novel that treats female friendship as the main event, not the subplot.
16
Brian Goldstone
Narrative NonfictionPulitzer Winner
Here’s the gut-punch of the list. Goldstone follows five Atlanta families who do everything right, hold down jobs, show up, keep trying, and still end up homeless in one of the richest countries on earth. It’s reporting that reads like a novel and reframes homelessness as something that happens to working people, not just the stereotype in your head. It isn’t a light beach read, but it’s easily one of the most important books here.
✨ Good to KnowIt won the Pulitzer Prize, and you’ll understand exactly why by the second chapter.
17
Ethan Rutherford
Historical FictionNat’l Book Award Finalist
Set in 1878 aboard a whaleship pointed toward the Arctic, North Sun starts as a salt-crusted seafaring adventure and slowly turns strange and mythic as the whaling industry (and the crew’s grip on reality) begins to crack. Think Moby-Dick’s eerier, colder grandchild. It landed as a National Book Award finalist, and it earns that Melville comparison without ever feeling like assigned reading.
📌 Worth KnowingIf you love a big, atmospheric sea voyage, this is the one to sink into over a long weekend.
18
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Narrative NonfictionFrom ‘Too Big to Fail’
The guy who made the 2008 meltdown read like a thriller in Too Big to Fail rewinds eighty years to the crash that started it all. Sorkin reconstructs the 1929 collapse almost day by day, the personalities, the panic, the denial, and how it shattered a nation. Fair warning: you’ll notice some deeply uncomfortable rhymes with the present. That’s very much the point.
💬 Our TakeIt’s history that moves like a suspense novel, so it’s a great pick if you usually bounce off nonfiction.
19
Kiran Desai
Literary FictionBooker Shortlist 2025
Nineteen years after The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker, Kiran Desai came back with this sprawling love story and promptly landed on the 2025 Booker shortlist again. Sonia and Sunny keep almost-finding each other across India and New York, tangled up in family expectations, class, and their own stubborn hearts. It’s long, generous, and the kind of book you happily live inside for a couple of weeks.
🎯 Why We Picked ItA Booker shortlist pick and a genuine literary event, since Desai publishes roughly once a generation.
20
Zadie Smith
EssaysZadie Smith
Zadie Smith could write a grocery list and we’d pre-order it. Dead and Alive gathers her recent essays on art, politics, writing, and the general weirdness of being alive right now, and the essay is the perfect format for how her mind actually works: quick, funny, willing to change its own conclusion mid-paragraph. Read one a night and you’ll feel roughly twelve percent smarter by morning.
📌 Worth KnowingThey’re essays, not a novel, so you can dip in and out. Ideal for a nightstand or a train commute.
21
Ian McEwan
Literary FictionSpeculative
Leave it to Ian McEwan to write a climate novel that’s really a literary detective story. What We Can Know is set generations from now, after rising seas have swallowed much of Britain, and follows a scholar obsessively piecing together a single lost evening (and a vanished poem) from our own era. It’s melancholy, clever, and quietly devastating about what actually survives us and what doesn’t.
💬 Our TakeClassic McEwan: a small, human mystery wrapped inside a very big idea about memory and loss.
22
Michelle Obama
Style & Memoir
Yes, the Obama book club has an actual Obama on it. The Look is Michelle’s celebration of fashion as self-expression, made with her longtime stylist Meredith Koop, part gorgeous lookbook, part memoir about visibility, identity, and getting dressed while the entire world watches and comments. It’s the most purely joyful pick on the list, and a genuinely beautiful object to leave out on a coffee table.
✨ Good to KnowIt’s heavily illustrated, so grab the physical hardcover over the e-book to actually enjoy the photos.
Obama's 2025 Summer Reading List
The stack he took into the summer, from a thousand-page Mark Twain biography to a one-sitting horror novel.
23
Ron Chernow
BiographyNYT Bestseller
The man whose Alexander Hamilton biography became, you know, HAMILTON, turns his doorstop-sized talents on Mark Twain. Chernow gives you the whole glorious contradiction: the funniest man in America, a hopeless businessman, a grieving father, and a savage critic of his country’s worst instincts. At around a thousand pages it’s a real commitment, but it somehow reads faster than books a third its length.
👀 Heads UpIt’s a genuine brick. Perfect for a long vacation, less ideal for one-handed subway reading.
24
Stephen Graham Jones
HorrorAward-Winning Horror
Part vampire novel, part historical reckoning, all nerve. Stephen Graham Jones frames the whole thing as a rediscovered 1912 journal in which a pastor records the confession of a Blackfeet man who happens to be immortal, and who’s got some very pointed feelings about the massacre of his people. It’s genuinely scary and genuinely angry at the same time, which is a rare and thrilling combination.
👀 Heads UpThis is real horror with real violence. If you scare easily it’ll absolutely get you, in the best way.
25
Madeleine Thien
Literary FictionBooker Finalist Author
This one’s a beautiful puzzle box. A girl and her father wash up in a strange, time-bending way station called The Sea, where she keeps meeting figures who feel suspiciously like Spinoza, Hannah Arendt, and the poet Du Fu. Madeleine Thien (of the Booker-shortlisted Do Not Say We Have Nothing) uses it all to think about migration, memory, and what exactly we owe the past. Ambitious and deeply moving.
📌 Worth KnowingIt rewards patience and a little Googling of its historical cameos. It’s absolute book-club catnip.
26
Sophie Elmhirst
Narrative NonfictionTrue Survival Story
A couple sells everything to sail around the world, a whale sinks their boat, and they spend the next four months adrift on a tiny raft in the middle of the Pacific. That’s the true story, but Sophie Elmhirst is really writing about the marriage itself, what it takes to be stuck in a very small space with one person and still keep choosing them. It’s gripping, weirdly funny, and secretly one of the best love stories of the year.
💬 Our TakeIt reads like a survival thriller but sneaks up on you as a genuinely great book about staying together.
27
Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson
Big IdeasNYT Bestseller
It’s the wonky book everyone actually argued about last year. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson diagnose why America has gotten so bad at building the things it obviously needs, housing, clean energy, high-speed rail, and make the case for a politics of abundance instead of endless scarcity. Agree or not, it set the terms of a real debate, which is exactly why it kept turning up at dinner parties and, apparently, on Obama’s nightstand.
🎯 Why We Picked ItIt’s the rare policy book that genuinely shifted the conversation. Read it just to know what everyone’s referencing.
28
Katie Kitamura
Literary FictionBooker Shortlist 2025
Katie Kitamura writes the most elegant unease in the business. Audition centers on an actress meeting a younger man who might be her son, might be something else entirely, and then quietly detonates your sense of which version of reality is the true one. It’s short, controlled, and just a little sinister, the literary equivalent of a held breath. No surprise at all that it made the 2025 Booker shortlist.
📌 Worth KnowingIt’s barely 200 pages and best read in one or two sittings, before the spell has a chance to break.
29
S. A. Cosby
Crime Thriller
Cosby is the reigning king of Southern crime fiction, and King of Ashes might be his most Godfather-shaped book yet. A slick, successful financial adviser gets yanked back to his Virginia hometown after his father’s suspicious accident, straight into the family crematorium business and his brother’s very dangerous debts. It’s propulsive, bloody, and secretly all about family loyalty. You’ll finish it in a single weekend.
💬 Our TakeIt’s the most pure fun on the entire list. Start it Friday and go ahead and cancel your Saturday plans.
30
Michael Lewis
Essay CollectionMichael Lewis
Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Big Short) rounds up a murderers’ row of writers, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, Geraldine Brooks, to profile the civil servants nobody thinks about until something breaks. The coal-mine-safety obsessive, the IRS data nerd, the person quietly keeping some vital system from collapsing. It’s a sneaky-moving argument that government is really just people, told through a stack of genuinely great short pieces.
✨ Good to KnowIt’s an essay anthology, so each chapter is a fresh writer and a fresh story. Very easy to read in bites.
31
Anita Desai
Literary FictionOne-Sitting Novella
At barely more than a hundred pages, Rosarita is the quiet stunner of the summer list. A young Indian woman studying in Mexico is approached by a strange old woman who insists she knew her mother, back when her mother was supposedly a painter with an entire secret life. Anita Desai (a three-time Booker finalist) turns it into a haunting little meditation on how little we actually know the people who raised us.
📌 Worth KnowingIt’s a true one-sitting novella. Perfect for the day you want to finish something whole and feel a lot.
32
Chris Hayes
Big IdeasNYT Bestseller
Chris Hayes wrote the book to read while you’re actively trying to stop doomscrolling. The Sirens’ Call argues that attention has quietly become the most valuable and most exploited resource on earth, and that the fight for your eyeballs is reshaping politics, work, and your own brain. It names the exact thing you feel every time you pick up your phone ‘just for a second’ and resurface forty minutes later.
🎯 Why We Picked ItIt’s the most immediately useful book here for understanding your own daily life. A little terrifying, very worth it.
The Bottom Line: Obama’s taste runs wide this year, a Louisiana family saga, a mind-bending trip through consciousness, a climate-age ghost story, and an 1980s New York heist, but it almost never misses. If you’ve only got room for one, start with Kin if you want to be swept up, This Land Is Your Land if you want to see the country clearly, or Cool Machine if you just want to be unable to stop turning pages. Then work your way through the rest at your own speed. Happy reading.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does Barack Obama share his reading list? +
He posts the lists himself, usually across his social accounts and his Medium page: a summer reading list in the warmer months and a longer favorites-of-the-year roundup each December. There's no official club to sign up for. The book club nickname just stuck because so many people read along with him.
How often does Obama release a new list? +
Twice a year, typically. A summer reading list around July, and a favorite books, movies and music roundup in December. This page is kept updated with his most recent picks, which right now means his 2026 summer list, his 2025 year-end favorites, and his 2025 summer list.
Are these books available as audiobooks? +
Almost all of them, yes. The doorstoppers like Mark Twain and 1929 are especially popular on audio precisely because they're so long. Tap the Amazon button on any title to find its Audible or Kindle edition alongside the print version.
What's the difference between the two lists on this page? +
The top section is his Favorite Books of 2025, a year-end best-of pulled from everything he read. Below it is his 2025 Summer Reading List, the stack he recommended heading into summer. A few titles were genuine cultural events, and every one comes straight from the reader-in-chief.
Does Michelle Obama have a book on the list? +
She does. The Look, Michelle Obama's celebration of fashion and personal style made with her longtime stylist Meredith Koop, landed on the 2025 favorites. It's easily the most purely fun pick of the bunch and a beautiful physical book to boot.
