What’s Barack Obama reading this summer?

The books world looked to the future this week. Native American author Tommy Orange’s new manuscript will be locked away until 2114. The 4thWrite prize for writers of colour opened for entries to find the authors of tomorrow. And the fundraiser to help restore Spellow Hub library, damaged in riots earlier this month, has now reached nearly £250,000.

This week’s newsletter zooms in on one of the buzziest moments of the literary calendar: Barack Obama’s summer reading list. And Mark Haddon gives his reading recommendations – specifically, for translated fiction. That’s coming up after some highlights.

Are anybody’s book recommendations as anticipated, followed or scrutinised as Barack Obama’s? His 2024 summer reading list alone, which dropped this week, was preceded by prediction pieces and spawned plenty of analysis as well as more than a quarter of a million likes, shares and comments across the former US president’s various social media channels.

The annual tradition began in 2009, the year Obama took office. As in other years, this summer’s list of 14 books is studded with big hitters. On the fiction side, there are two Booker-longlisted novels – James by Percival Everett and Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel – alongside much talked-about debuts, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. In terms of nonfiction, there’s Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea, about Captain Cook, and John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke, on how the 90s shaped modern conservatism.

Obama clearly has a thing for thrillers and crime: alongside Bradley, there’s Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. She said Obama’s “interest in and support for the arts” is “evidence of his thoughtfulness and his philosophical attitude toward leadership” – she wishes other leaders would “follow his example”.

Jonathan Blitzer, whose book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here is on this year’s list, agrees on the rarity of a bibliophile politician: “I still remember how, when Obama was president, he conducted an interview with Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books. Can you imagine any other US president doing that?” (Incidentally, Robinson also features with Reading Genesis, her take on the first book of the Bible.)

“It’s especially meaningful that he’s read and recommended my book because he’s in it,” adds Blitzer. “Part of [it] is a political history of immigration in the US, and Obama’s presidency is a significant and endlessly controversial piece of that.”

Adelle Waldman, whose novel Help Wanted was also recommended this year, felt a “mixture of awe and amazement” at “one of the most powerful people in the world spending hours” with her characters, “a group of low-level retail employees at a chainstore in upstate New York”.

Some have questioned whether the surely very busy Obama actually does read and pick the books himself – though a senior aide insists he does, and there’s no real evidence to suggest otherwise.

The fact that Obama’s choices are all mainstream – nine of this summer’s titles are published by Penguin in the US – has played into sceptics’ arguments. If he does indeed read them, it would mean that he is the “median” consumer “of all American culture”, wrote journalist Alex Shephard last year. “The tell of the lists is that they’re too perfectly zeitgeisty”. Along with his summer playlists and film recommendations, they represent “the platonic ideal of cool dad taste”, wrote Josiah Gogarty this week: “tasteful, but not too tasteful”.

Others argue it all serves to help sanitise Obama’s legacy. “It’s a particularly grim spectacle – watching some people within publishing grandstand about having a book on the annual Obama reading list,” said Keiran Goddard, whose most recent novel is I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning. “It’s not equivalent to a standard celebrity endorsement”. If he “released an annual list of his favourite drone strikes, that would be more credible”, Goddard added, describing the list as a “brand exercise”.

Completing this year’s recommendations are There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib, Beautiful Days by Zach Williams, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko and Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves.

I have a longstanding beef with literature which shies away from the truly dramatic, as if keeping the cameras rolling during the sex scene, the bank robbery or the car crash is the preserve of genre fiction. Tender Is the Flesh by the Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica, translated by Sarah Moses (the original title “Cadáver exquisito” – Exquisite Corpse – is even better) takes a blood-spattered rotary saw to that prudish convention. It is set in a dystopian future where, after a plague which makes other animals dangerous for people to eat, some humans are bred for their meat. The protagonist Marcos manages one of the human slaughterhouses. To say I enjoyed this would be the wrong word, but I was utterly gripped and it was thrilling to see a literary novel kicking over the traces so gleefully.

If I’d been asked – which I wasn’t – I would have given the International Booker prize to Ia Genberg for The Details, in which we come to know the narrator, whom we never see directly, through vivid portraits of four people with whom she’s had deep and formative emotional relationships throughout her life. The translation from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson is so good that I kept underlining passages so I could reread them later.

Currently I’m reading The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, for the third time. It’s an utterly sui generis masterpiece which purports to be a series of interviews with human and humanoid workers on a ship orbiting the planet New Discovery. It’s sci-fi, it’s poetry, it’s a troubling mystery, it’s a critique of the modern workplace and a study of the function of art. It is also, for me, one of those landmark novels which opens up a whole new area of the literary map, and I suspect I’ll be reading it many more times.