The Maris Review, vol 11

I can never predict who’s gonna win the Nobel or the Pulitzer but I’m sure I could get at least 80% of Obama’s summer reading list.

Jul 02, 2024

∙ Paid

Here it is: the platonic ideal of the summer thriller. It’s set at a sleep away camp in the Adirondacks in 1975, where a 13 year-old camper named Barbara goes missing. Barbara just so happens to be a Van Laar, of the Van Laars who own the camp (and the land around the camp and just about everyone in the town). The Van Laars are awful in all the ways that the very rich can be, and we watch them rule their rustic fiefdom with very little concern for the people around them. Liz Moore’s last book was the exquisite Long Bright River, another perfect thriller, but one that felt more tragic given its setting in an opioid-ridden section of Philadelphia. The God of the Woods is much better as beach read, maybe a little less nuance but still a book to get lost in while, you know, the world burns.

The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

Here’s a weirder, more complicated thriller if you want to get a little bit more experimental this summer. Told through fragments of a bunch of primary sources (the Table of Contents section lists items like “Letter 1, torn, partial” and “Note 2, slight bloodstaining” piece together what happened to an unhappy couple who disappear after honeymooning in off-peak season on a Greek island. Sinister as hell.

Folks, sometimes the very prolific tweeter is right

Okay, let’s do this:

We know that President Obama absolutely and for sure does all of his own reading and title selecting for his summer and end of year best-of lists and we know he is always up on the hot new literary fiction. He often reads a history or two, he likes a thriller every now and then, he goes in for diversity of gender and ethnicity.

I want to make very clear that I’m not making a value judgement on these books. Indeed, the list contains many of my favorite titles of the year. The internet loves to make fun of Obama’s middlebrow taste, but I myself am not all that far away.

Pretty sure:

James by Percival Everett
Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
Knife by Salman Rushdie
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space by Adam Higginbotham
There’s Always This Year by Hanif Abdurraqib
The Hunter by Tana French

What did I miss?

Likely:

Real Americans by Rachel Khong
Godwin by Joseph O’Neil
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz
The Friday Afternoon Club by Griffin Dunne
Another Word For Love by Carvell Wallace
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, trans. by Natasha Wimmer
The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality by Amanda Montell

Unlikely (with some explanation)

Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis by Jonathan Blitzer
A book about the US-Mexico border crisis that implicates Obama among other US presidents? Probably not.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
A stunning debut novel about a wealthy young Palestinian woman who is slowly and then quickly losing her shit in Brooklyn. A book that allows a Palestinian woman to be as messy and angry and weird as her many Sad Girl white counterparts? I don’t think he’s ready for it.
Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
A (beautifully written! read it!) autobiographical novel about the disillusionment of a young and idealistic man who works as a fundraiser on the presidential campaign of a charismatic Democratic hopeful (named in the book only as the Senator from Illinois) in 2007 or so. It’s so funny because if this book wasn’t explicitly about Obama, it would for sure be the kind of book he’d want on his list.