Sunday, December 31, 2017

Bedside reading of the Presidents



Former President Obama has released his annual reading list on his Facebook page.

 During my presidency, I started a tradition of sharing my reading lists and playlists. It was a nice way to reflect on the works that resonated with me and lift up authors and artists from around the world. With some extra time on my hands this year to catch up, I wanted to share the books and music that I enjoyed most...The best books I read in 2017:

The Power by Naomi Alderman

Grant by Ron Chernow

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Five-Carat Soul by James McBride

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout

Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

*Bonus for hoops fans: Coach Wooden and Me by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Basketball (and Other Things) by Shea Serrano

The former president is known for being a prodigious reader, as were his predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

 In November 2016, Obama gave Wired magazine a list of "essential reading"- ten titles in eighteen volumes- the editors estimated would take 89 hours to get through. He was not above being known to have long discussions with authors- in public.

 In two parts.

 Four days before leaving office, on January 16, Obama gave The New York Times an interview on what books mean to him.



The new occupant of The White House also handled some books in 2017.

 In a January 17 Axios interview, the *resident-elect un-recommended a book:
When asked about books on his desk, he showed us "Adams v Jefferson" by John Ferling. We asked if we should read it. "I wouldn't," he said.
In January, The New York Times reported flatly that Trump "does not read books," instead preferring to watch TV to unwind in the evenings.
The *resident himself told Tucker Carlson in March,
Well, you know, I love to read. Actually, I’m looking at a book, I’m reading a book, I’m trying to get started. Every time I do about a half a page, I get a phone call that there’s some emergency, this or that. But we’re going to see the home of Andrew Jackson today in Tennessee and I’m reading a book on Andrew Jackson. I love to read. I don’t get to read very much, Tucker, because I’m working very hard on lots of different things, including getting costs down. The costs of our country are out of control. But we have a lot of great things happening, we have a lot of tremendous things happening.
Trump didn't say what Jackson book he was reading, though he did recommend one that came out nine months later. Did he get an advance copy?

 In his Twitter feed, he recommended eight books, half of which are about him. 


 The book is ex-Sheriff David Clarke's Cop Under Fire.

The full title is  The Art of the Donald: Lessons from America's Philosopher-in-Chief.



The *resident also has his name on the covers of eighteen books he did not write between 1987 and 2015.  In a 2016 New Yorker article, Jane Mayer delineated the then-candidate's relationship with the printed word:

 “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, [Tony] Schwartz [ghostwriter for 1987's The Art of the Deal] said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Other journalists have noticed Trump’s apparent lack of interest in reading. In May, Megyn Kelly, of Fox News, asked him to name his favorite book, other than the Bible or “The Art of the Deal.” Trump picked the 1929 novel “All Quiet on the Western Front.” Evidently suspecting that many years had elapsed since he’d read it, Kelly asked Trump to talk about the most recent book he’d read. “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time,” Trump said. As The New Republic noted recently, this attitude is not shared by most U.S. Presidents, including Barack Obama, a habitual consumer of current books, and George W. Bush, who reportedly engaged in a fiercely competitive book-reading contest with his political adviser Karl Rove.

Trump’s first wife, Ivana, famously claimed that Trump kept a copy of Adolf Hitler’s collected speeches, “My New Order,” in a cabinet beside his bed. In 1990, Trump’s friend Marty Davis, who was then an executive at Paramount, added credence to this story, telling Marie Brenner, of Vanity Fair, that he had given Trump the book. “I thought he would find it interesting,” Davis told her. When Brenner asked Trump about it, however, he mistakenly identified the volume as a different work by Hitler: “Mein Kampf.” Apparently, he had not so much as read the title. “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” Trump told Brenner.
at

No comments:

Post a Comment

We enjoy hearing from visitors! Please leave your questions, thoughts, wish lists, or whatever else is on your mind.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)