Daniel Kreps
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Barack Obama poses in the office of The Harvard Law Review on Monday, Feb. 5, 1990 Lane Turner/The Boston Globe/Getty Images Barack Obama will discuss a half-dozen of his favorite books on a new six-episode podcast coming exclusively to Audible in September.
A Great Book With Barack Obama will find the former president and yet-to-be-announced guests talking about six books that profoundly shaped his worldview and our society. Among the titles chosen by Obama are Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
“Great books have always helped me figure out who I am and what I believe. The six books featured in this series have stayed with me throughout my life, and each one has something to teach us about the human experience,” Obama said in a statement.
“For this podcast, I invited some friends to explore why they resonate, how they can shape our understanding of ourselves and each other, and why literature matters now more than ever. I hope listeners will be inspired to discover or rediscover books that change the way they see themselves and the world.”
The other three books featured in the podcast’s first six episodes are John le Carre’s spy novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and the most recently penned book in the podcast series, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer-winning 2004 book Gilead. (Obama has long praised Gilead as one of his favorite books, and even interviewed — while president — Robinson about the book for the New York Review of Books in 2015 when Obama visited Des Moines, where Robinson was teaching at the University of Iowa.)
