Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2025

Revenge, snow, and a vampire on the Blackfeet reservation: Jones makes historical horror feel earned, not gimmicky. If you want your westerns with teeth, start here.

Klein and Thompson argue America's shortages are self-inflicted, from housing to immigration, and call for a politics of plenty. Read it to argue with it, or with it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin retells the most famous crash in history with the pace of a thriller, and the greed and blind optimism feel uncomfortably familiar. Long, but it never reads like homework.

Angela Flournoy follows sisters and friends through the messy decade when adulthood stops being provisional. Anyone past twenty-five will recognize the freedom and the consequences both.

Desai's novel follows two young people whose grandparents once tried to matchmake them; it's a patient, spellbound narrative that rewards careful reading.

An elderly stranger in a Mexican garden claims to have known Bonita's mother, unraveling a story of memory and history. Desai's prose remains masterful.

Chris Hayes argues your focus is being strip-mined, and he's convincing. Read it before your phone reads you.

Beth Macy blends memoir and reportage to trace what's eroding American communities, and she does it by actually talking to people. Read it if the divide in your own hometown has been nagging at you.

A father vanishes on a beach walk, leaving a ten-year-old girl barely alive, and Susan Choi spends the rest of the novel circling that night from every angle. The shifting perspectives may challenge some readers.

Jill Lepore asks why one of the world's oldest constitutions is also the hardest to amend, and her answer speaks to a troubling new era. A sharp companion for the 250th anniversary, not just a civics refresher.

Zadie Smith on Tár, Kilburn High Road, and the deaths of Didion, Amis, and Mantel. The collection blends art criticism with reflective mourning of literary figures, never tipping into sentiment.

Michelle Obama talks about her style evolution in her own words for the first time, with 200-plus photographs to back her up. Fashion as a way of being heard, not just seen.

Ron Chernow takes on the riverboat pilot turned literary celebrity, from Mississippi steamboat dreams to the Nevada newspaper job that started it all. If you've only met Twain through school assignments, this is the full, complicated man.

Full-time jobs that don't pay the rent: Goldstone follows five Atlanta families into that gap. If you think homelessness is about unemployment, this will rearrange your assumptions.

A whaleship bound for the Chukchi Sea in 1878, hunting until the ice closes in. Rutherford turns the last days of whaling into an adventure with extraction on its mind.

A dinner party poem becomes an object of obsession for generations. McEwan keeps bending genre to ask what history can ever actually recover.

A girl and her father wait out a migration in a place where a Dutch scholar, a German philosopher, and a Tang poet are neighbors. Thien makes big ideas feel like conversation, not homework.

A son comes home to a crematorium, a brother's debts, and trouble that won't stay buried. Cosby's Godfather-inflected Southern crime story moves like a heist and hurts like a family dinner.

An actress lunches with a much younger man, then the novel retells itself. Kitamura's Möbius strip will delight anyone who likes not knowing whom to trust.

A whale sinks their boat and the marriage somehow holds. Elmhirst turns one couple's 1972 escape into a survival story about what people owe each other.

Lewis and his collaborators profile the people doing federal work, and the result is a civics lesson that reads like narrative nonfiction. Worth it for the storytelling alone.