📚Barack Obama's favorite books of 2023

His year-end list, all fifteen, the four carried over from his summer picks left in. I already had three on my shelf before this dropped.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store - James McBride

start here if you only read one. a Jewish and Black community in 1930s Pennsylvania, rewards a slow read

The Maniac - Benjamin Labatut

fiction dressed as biography, von Neumann and the edge of sanity in physics

Poverty, By America - Matthew Desmond

How to Say Babylon - Safiya Sinclair

memoir about growing up Rastafari in Jamaica, her father gets no easy redemption arc

shipwreck, mutiny, court martial, all true. read it before the Scorsese movie

Chip War - Chris Miller

the semiconductor industry as geopolitics, drier than the rest of this list but worth it

The Vaster Wilds - Lauren Groff

Humanly Possible - Sarah Bakewell

300 years of humanist thought, no lore exam required, you can dip in and out

King: A Life - Jonathan Eig

first full biography written with access to the newly declassified FBI files

The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese

The Best Minds - Jonathan Rosen

a friendship, then a murder, then decades of second guessing the mental health system

All the Sinners Bleed - S.A. Cosby

The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory - Tim Alberta

evangelical politics from a writer who grew up inside it

Some People Need Killing - Patricia Evangelista

the Philippines' drug war told through the people who carried it out. not an easy read, the one that stuck with me longest

This Other Eden - Paul Harding

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