Why Obama Champions Fiction Over Almost Anything Else
Obama has made an unusually pointed case for the novel as a tool of citizenship. In his 2015 conversation with novelist Marilynne Robinson, he said that "the most important stuff I've learned I think I've learned from novels," tying it specifically to empathy and "the notion that it's possible to connect with someone else even though they're very different from you." He told Michiko Kakutani that fiction "exercises those muscles" of empathy and that sometimes "you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else." This is not a casual preference but a worldview: Obama treats novels as data about human experience, a way of inhabiting lives unlike his own. That conviction is the lens through which to read every favorite below.
"Gilead" and John Ames: Obama's Favorite Character in Fiction
Few books drew more open affection from Obama than Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead," the Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel he picked up while campaigning in Iowa. He admired it enough to seek Robinson out and conduct a recorded two-part conversation with her, published in The New York Review of Books in 2015. In it, Obama singled out the novel's narrator: "one of my favorite characters in fiction is a pastor in Gilead, Iowa, named John Ames, who is gracious and courtly and a little bit confused about how to reconcile his faith with all the various travails that his family goes through." The choice is revealing — Ames is a figure of quiet moral struggle rather than action, which fits Obama's stated taste for fiction that sits with ambiguity. "Gilead" recurs across his favorite-books lists for years.
Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon": The Novel of Identity
If "Gilead" is the favorite he discovered as an adult, "Song of Solomon" is the one that formed him. Obama first read Morrison's novel as an undergraduate at Occidental College, and he has cited it more than any other as the book that shaped his sense of identity. Its themes — heritage, self-invention, and the search for a usable past — map closely onto the questions Obama would later explore in his own memoir. He has placed it at the very top of his all-time favorites and honored Morrison personally, awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. For Obama, "Song of Solomon" is the proof case of his larger argument: that a novel can change how a person understands who they are.
"Moby-Dick" and the Nineteenth-Century Canon
Among the older works Obama returns to, Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" stands out, appearing alongside Shakespeare's tragedies and Lincoln's writings on his lists of foundational favorites. Melville's novel — an obsessive captain, an unkillable whale, a meditation on ambition and ruin — offers exactly the tragic, pattern-aware view of human striving that Obama has said literature taught him. He has spoken of Shakespeare's tragedies as "foundational" for understanding how human patterns repeat, and the same sensibility draws him to Melville. These are not light reads chosen for pleasure alone; they are the canonical works Obama treats as a permanent reference library for thinking about power, hubris, and fate. Their presence shows a reader comfortable moving between contemporary fiction and the deep canon.
The Global Novel: García Márquez, Naipaul, and Beyond
Obama's favorites extend well past American shores, reflecting his belief that fiction is a passport into unfamiliar worlds. In his 2017 Kakutani interview he named Gabriel García Márquez, V.S. Naipaul, and Junot Díaz among the authors who helped him understand experiences different from his own, and García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and Naipaul's "A Bend in the River" recur on his recommendation lists. He has also celebrated newer fiction — naming Lauren Groff's "Fates and Furies" his favorite novel of 2015 and praising Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad," which he read just before leaving office. The breadth is deliberate: Obama has warned that American readers increasingly stay "in their niche," and his own fiction reading is a standing rebuke to that, ranging across nations, eras, and styles.