It’s officially the most wonderful time of the year: Barack Obama just shared his highly anticipated list of his favorite reads of 2024. “I always look forward to sharing my annual list of favorite books, movies, and music,” the former president wrote in the caption to his posts on Instagram, X, and, Facebook “Today I’ll start by sharing some of the books that have stuck with me long after I finished reading them.” Let’s take a closer look at the stories that got stuck in Obama’s head this year.
As usual, the former president proved he has excellent literary taste—although we may be a bit biased as there’s a fair amount of overlap between the former president’s recommendations and our own Best Books of the Year lists…
For the most part, Obama’s list highlights newly published books he did let a couple of last year’s releases sneak in. In Orbital (one of our favorite books of 2023!) author Samantha Harvey takes readers on board a cramped space station with six members of an international mission as they rotate the earth 16 times in 24 hours. Through their eyes, we watch typhoons grow in the Pacific, packs of noodles float in zero gravity, and continents whir by. In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes is another 2023 release and another otherworldly adventure. This literary sci-fi novel follows Leigh, a young scientist exploring a newly discovered trench on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. She hopes to find signs of Earth’s earliest lifeforms, but instead finds evidence that turns her understanding of the planet—and herself—upside down.
While last year’s list skewed heavily toward deeply researched investigations like Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America, this year’s is evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction. We were excited to see that the former commander-in-chief is also a Sally Rooney fan. Rooney is known for her romances, and while there is plenty of passionate and complex couplings in Intermezzo, the central love story is between two brothers, reeling in the aftermath of their father’s death. Unlike the typical Rooney characters, these raw grievers don’t have the luxury of inhibition, romantic or otherwise; the result is electric. We counted Intermezzo as one of the most moving books of 2024.
See the list below for the full list of Obama’s year-end recommendations and consider your holiday reading sorted!
