Year-End Lists

Barack Obama: Favorite Books of 2025, as posted to Medium

[see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017]

• Paper Girl

  A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America
  Beth Macy
• Flashlight
  Susan Choi
• We the People

  A History of the U.S. Constitution
  Jill Lepore
• The Wilderness
  Angela Flournoy
• There Is No Place for Us

  Working and Homeless in America
  Brian Goldstone
• North Sun

  Or, The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther
  Ethan Rutherford
• 1929

  Inside the Greatest Crash in History--and How It Shattered a Nation
  Andrew Ross Sorkin
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
  Kiran Desai
• Dead and Alive
  Zadie Smith
• What We Can Know
  Ian McEwan

And obviously I'm biased

• The Look
  Michelle Obama

Books Recomended Over the Summer

• Mark Twain
  Ron Chernow
• The Book of Records
  Madeleine Thien
• King of Ashes
  S.A. Cosby
• Rosarita
  Anita Desai
• Audition
  Katie Kitamura
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
  Stephen Graham Jones
• Abundance
  Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
• A Marriage at Sea

  A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck
  Sophie Elmhirst
• Who Is Government?

  The Untold Story of Public Service
  Michael Lewis
• The Sirens' Call

  How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
  Chris Hayes