📚Barack Obama's favorite books of 2025

posts this every December, no ranking implied, just the books that stuck with him this year

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Paper Girl - Beth Macy

memoir plus reporting on a divided America. heavier than most of the rest of this list

Flashlight, Susan Choi

We the People (Jill Lepore)

historian, so expect footnotes doing real work

The Wilderness - Angela Flournoy

was also up for the National Book Award this year

There Is No Place For Us, Brian Goldstone

North Sun - Ethan Rutherford

a whaling novel. did not expect that to end up on this list but here we are

1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai)

Booker shortlist. start here if you only pick one fiction title off this

Dead and Alive - Zadie Smith

essays, not a novel. covers a lot of ground

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan

The Look - Michelle Obama

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