Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2021: The Complete Reading List

Barack Obama’s annual book lists have become a reliable source of ambitious reading recommendations. His 2021 selections move across literary fiction, memoir, history, science, crime, and science fiction, with stories about race, migration, family, memory, climate change, and the way the past keeps shaping the present.

Obama shared recommendations in both the summer and at the end of the year. Together, the two lists contain 24 books. We have separated them below so readers can see which titles appeared in each roundup, with a short guide to what every book is about.

Barack Obama’s 11 Favorite Books at the End of 2021

1. Matrix by Lauren Groff

Groff reimagines the life of the medieval poet Marie de France, sent away from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s court to lead an impoverished English abbey. It is a novel about faith, female power, ambition, and the creation of a community apart from men.

2. How the Word Is Passed by Clint Smith

Poet and journalist Clint Smith visits monuments, plantations, prisons, cemeteries, and other sites to examine how the United States remembers slavery—and how public history can reveal or conceal the truth.

3. The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

Told as an oral history, Walton’s novel reconstructs the rise and fall of a fictional 1970s interracial rock duo. Music, fame, race, protest, and memory collide as an editor investigates the violent event that defined their legacy.

4. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

In 1954, a young man returning home from juvenile detention plans to drive west with his brother. Two unexpected companions redirect the journey toward New York, turning the novel into a sprawling road story about friendship and second chances.

5. Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott

Elliott’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work of narrative nonfiction follows Dasani, a girl growing up in a New York City homeless shelter, and her family over eight years. It makes poverty personal without losing sight of the institutions surrounding it.

6. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

Furniture salesman Ray Carney is mostly respectable, but family connections pull him into a heist and Harlem’s criminal underworld. Whitehead blends crime, comedy, family drama, and a changing 1960s neighborhood. This was one of my favorites on Obama’s list; read our full review of Harlem Shuffle.

7. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Doerr links young people in fifteenth-century Constantinople, a modern Idaho library, and a spacecraft in the future through an ancient story. The novel celebrates books, survival, and the unexpected ways stories travel through time.

8. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett

This essay collection ranges across friendship, family, writing, ownership, and the life of a bookstore. Patchett’s gift is making ordinary decisions feel quietly consequential.

9. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

The Japanese Breakfast musician writes about losing her mother, growing up Korean American, and finding a route back to memory through food. It is both a grief memoir and an intimate portrait of a complicated mother-daughter bond.

10. Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu

Owusu’s memoir traces a childhood lived across countries, her father’s death, her mother’s absence, and the search for a stable identity. The image of an earthquake becomes a structure for understanding inherited trauma and emotional displacement.

11. Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen

The first novel in Franzen’s planned A Key to All Mythologies trilogy follows the Hildebrandt family in 1970s Illinois. Each family member wants freedom, but faith, desire, resentment, and obligation keep their lives tightly entangled.

Obama published this year-end list with his favorite films and music in his official 2021 cultural roundup.

Barack Obama’s 13 Summer 2021 Reading Picks

12. The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

This multigenerational epic follows Ailey Pearl Garfield as she uncovers her family’s history in the American South. Personal inheritance and the larger history of race in America become inseparable.

13. Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang

Wang recounts coming to the United States from China as a child and living with her family’s undocumented status. The memoir captures both the fear of precarity and a young reader’s determination to imagine a different future.

14. At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

In this intense novel, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France during World War I descends into violence and isolation after his friend’s death. Diop confronts colonialism, trauma, and the brutal logic of war.

15. Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen

Chen’s short stories portray people navigating ambition, bureaucracy, censorship, family, and rapid change in contemporary China and its diaspora. The collection moves comfortably between realism and the surreal.

16. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

Keefe investigates the Sackler family, Purdue Pharma, and the marketing of OxyContin. It is a detailed account of wealth, philanthropy, corporate power, and the opioid crisis.

17. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

A lone astronaut wakes with missing memories and a mission that may determine humanity’s survival. Weir turns science problems into cliffhangers without losing the story’s humor or heart. It remains one of my strongest recommendations from this list; see our review of Project Hail Mary.

18. When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut

Labatut blends fact and fiction in linked accounts of scientific discovery. The book asks what happens when knowledge becomes so powerful that the people who uncover it can no longer control its consequences.

19. Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert

Kolbert examines interventions designed to repair environmental damage caused by earlier interventions. Her reporting explores climate engineering, invasive species, and the unsettling prospect of managing a planet humans have already transformed.

20. Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen

A Vietnamese family resettles in New Orleans without the father they left behind. Over decades, the novel follows their adaptation, fractures, and attachments as another disaster approaches the city.

21. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A family’s vacation is interrupted when the owners of their rental house arrive during a mysterious blackout. With information scarce and trust fragile, domestic tension becomes an unsettling disaster story.

22. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Narrated by an observant artificial friend waiting to be chosen by a child, Ishiguro’s novel studies love, loneliness, sacrifice, and what people believe makes a person irreplaceable.

23. The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

Set in Georgia at the end of the Civil War, Harris’s novel brings two newly freed brothers into the orbit of a grieving white family. The fragile arrangement exposes secrets and violence in a community resisting change.

24. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

An interpreter at an international court in The Hague becomes entangled in the language of alleged war crimes and the uncertain private life of a man whose marriage may not be over. The novel is cool, tense, and alert to the power hidden in translation.

Where to Start

For an immediately gripping novel, start with Project Hail Mary or Harlem Shuffle. Readers who want memoir can choose between the food-and-grief narrative of Crying in H Mart, the immigration story in Beautiful Country, and the searching family history of Aftershocks. For major nonfiction, How the Word Is Passed, Invisible Child, and Empire of Pain are the standouts.

The strength of Obama’s 2021 recommendations is their range. A reader could spend months moving through the list and never encounter the same kind of book twice. Which one would you pick first?