Obama’s New Podcast Is the Best Kind of Book Club

Books A Great Book With Barack Obama Is the Best Kind of Book Club Remember what it was like to have a president who actually reads? By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Laura Miller? Sept 29, 202611:00 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Angelina Katsanis/Pool/Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I recently got back from several days of road-tripping around Maine with an old friend, an interlude of clam-shack lunches and daily quests for the best ice cream in whatever town we visited. Then my friend flew home, and it was time to return to my usual meals of salads and grilled chicken breasts, which made me feel like a kid forced to go back to school after summer vacation. Just a couple of weeks earlier I happily ate like this all the time, but now my customary healthy diet seemed so dull and unappetizing. Listening to the new six-episode podcast A Great Book With Barack Obama, if you happen to be all too accustomed to the conflict-driven content typically found on the internet, is a bit like sitting down to that salad. The podcast, available exclusively on Audible, has the former president discussing books that, he explains, “had a profound effect on how I see the world,” with a different guest for each title. First up is Tom Hanks, who sits down with Obama to talk about Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer-winning novel told in the form of letters written by a Congregationalist pastor in small-town 1950s Iowa to his young son. Obama and Hanks, 65 and 70, respectively, reflect on how the novel speaks to their experiences of raising children, assessing the role of faith in their lives, and coming to terms with their own mortality. They come across as decent, thoughtful, and genuinely humble dads—remarkable when you recall that one of them is a movie star and the other a former president of the United States—with two of the most soothing voices on the planet. So how is this podcast like salad? Well, it’s wholesome and unlikely to irritate the system, as well as intellectually and spiritually nutritious. It’s also frankly unexciting, and a bit staid, given that nothing in it is aimed to provoke anger or indignation. It makes no attempt to be fashionable or to engage with hot topics. As Obama points out in the podcast’s sixth episode—the liveliest of the lot, a conversation about Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses, with novelist Lauren Groff—most of his picks for this first season of A Great Book With Barack Obama were either written during or set in the early 20th century. They are also predominantly literary fiction (with the exception of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time), a sleepy cultural genre that can seldom generate enough controversy to register in the discourse. Perhaps the most inflammatory moment in the whole affair comes when Groff remarks that there are “no living women” in McCarthy’s body of work (meaning that his female characters are either dead or not persuasively human), a statement with which Obama agrees but that will possibly rile up some of the more zealous McCarthy cultists. Make no mistake: Many people—people who are not very online—will find A Great Book With Barack Obama lovely and inspiring. Obama has been releasing annual lists of his favorite books since his first year in office in 2009, and his choices tend to be acclaimed works of both fiction and nonfiction, the kinds of titles that end up admiringly reviewed in the New Yorker and on the short lists for prestigious rewards. I’ve heard complaints that his lists were too safe or obvious, but it was news to me until recently that some people have speculated that he didn’t actually read all of the books on his lists, that they were strategically chosen by staffers. Well, to those who suspect this: It’s too bad that Obama’s reading habits make you feel insecure, but this claim is laughable to anyone who has read his own books or knows anything about his history as an autodidact and aspiring writer. A Great Book With Barack Obama should settle the matter, though, as it’s clear from these conversations that Obama has read not only each of the titles under discussion but also other books by the same authors, as well as the books written by his guests. It took a while for A Great Book With Barack Obama to overcome my jaded palate, and it’s true that some of the episodes (the discussion of Baldwin with Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example) contain nothing that you won’t have heard many times before. Eventually, however, the podcast won me over. It is the closest a digital artifact can come to touching grass, and the nostalgic glow imparted by recalling a president who can actually read and write books cannot be discounted. Every reader’s tastes reflect something of themselves, and Obama is no exception. In talking about Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men with historian Jill Lepore and John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with his own deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, the former president more than once alludes to what he calls “ambiguity,” the difficulty of reconciling one’s idealism with actually accomplishing anything while in power. He also makes some remarkable observations, such as “80 percent, maybe 90 percent, of the world’s problems is the result of old men being afraid to die.” “This the best book club I’ve ever been to!” Groff enthuses at the end of her episode, and it’s hard to disagree with that. If Obama’s discussion of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon with Percival Everett fails to bring out the mischievous streak that makes Everett so much fun to read, it’s still cheering to listen to the two of them do a close reading of Morrison’s fabulous description of one of her characters’ drives through town in his ostentatious Packard and how much this passage conveys about the community where the novel is set. That it is still possible to read and talk and think this way in a world that feels given over to spite, laziness, braggadocio, and sensationalism is the ultimate lesson of this podcast. By the time I got to the end of A Great Book With Barack Obama, that salad was starting to look good again. Barack Obama Books Podcasts