President Obama's Summer 2016 Reading List
Fiction
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
A psychological suspense set in London which smacks of Hitchcock.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Compelling work of science fiction about Earth’s doomed fate.
The Underground Railroad: A Novel by Colson Whitehead
Follow Cora, an enslaved woman, from brutalization to escape, into possibly inconceivable evil in this historical fiction penned by Colson Whitehead, The 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Fiction (John Henry Days, Doubleday).
Non-Fiction
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan
Professional surfer William Finnegan’s self-portrait of obsession is The 2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner in autobiography.
H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Training a dangerous bird-of-prey named Mabel is the coping mechanism Helen Macdonald uses while grieving the death of her father. She explores her struggle and fixation in this real-life account.
Titles from Summer 2015:
- All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - Historical Fiction set in WWII France
- The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert - Science about Evolution and Extinction
- The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri - Fiction set in India and America
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates - Race Relations
- Washington: A Life by Ron Chernow - Biography
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