What do you think of President Emeritus Obama's top books of 2017?

What do you think of President Emeritus Obama's top books of 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

seems pretty dad-tier to me

Do they just give presidents and CEOs a list of shitty books to promote? I can't imagine a real flesh and blood person reading such a dull, -approved selection of books. Obama probably doesn't have enough time on his hands to read such dreary fucking books let alone the fact they're apparently the cream of the crop of a wider selection of books he read. WHO THE FUCK READS THIS MANY BOOKS FROM THE CURRENT YEAR

>presidents and CEOs
These people read hundreds of books a year. They have ran out of good books to read decades ago.

lol no they don't

I know that when he had an opportunity to do a vanity project he spoke to Marilynne Robinson for like 3 hours through NYRB. Also, he isnt in some secret cabal pushing liberalism for the sake of destroying the country, he's an American Black. He very sincerely believes many of his talking points when it comes to the type of small L liberalism these books espouse.

Everyone and their mother is pushing exit west, i havent read it. I guarantee he actually liked the last one. James McBride is a fun read. And if he really did read any of these, I wouldnt blame him because taking a mental year off after president.

All that said, he is almost certainly getting paid, a lot, to push these.

Oh really, ask him.

>read a book a day
>get successful
yea no, i usually read a book a day and it doesn't work
t.neet

>The Power by Naomi Alderman

>mfw feminists actually get female power fantasies published

The West is truly fucked.

>he's an American Black
unironically the shittiest meme produces by his presidency. Obama's father was from Kenya, which is in EAST AFRICA for those who are geographically illiterate, he is not the descendant of American slaves, who are primarily from West Africa. His mother was a white slut, who drug him across the world so he would grow up in Indonesia, before ditching him with her well off parents in Hawaii. He barely saw his biological father, and was raised by South East Asians and white Americans. I think it is also possible to find him giving a speech in Indonesian, and he studied Arabic in his early education, although I am not sure how much he retained in later life. Obama is biologically THE DEFINITION of "African-American" and it is a stretch of your imagination to describe him as an American "Black".

He had an identity crisis once reaching adulthood, and considered gayness (according to Pulitzer prize winning biographer). You can watch him assume an Black American slang when he gave speeches to majority Black audiences, but this is wholly unnatural and ironically cultural appropriation. He was never natural as the cool "American Black" that you see on TV, it never fit, he went to Harvard, is multilingual because of his unique upbringing and NEVER experienced the hardships or history of your average American Black. Obama's historical achievement as the "first Black president" is really diminished by the reality of his situation, considering he is not of real Black American stock and his father was never a slave and died in Kenya. Obama is a media meme.

>NEVER experienced the hardships or history of your average American Black.
>muh passive suffering
t. current numale; future cuck in the making

clean my asshole you anthropomorphic enema, cause that's what you're doing when you respond to my shitposts you human douche.

>defending Obama

>A gentleman in Moscow

why is anne so cute

>anthropomorphic
>human
tried so hard; still failed, a symptom of the times that molded you and will continue to mold you into a self resenting cuck

>a simple dismissal
not too bad

superior jewish genes

>a bunch of fag books and basketball crap
Lame.
It's a crappy enough list that I bet it's to be real. If Trump comes out with a list then it can safely be assumed these lists are fake though. Kek.

Obama was done with the western canon by his early twenties. Read a couple of his letters to his older literary girlfriend from back when he was living the literary lifestyle. Then read the thousands upon thousands of diary entries written by said girlfriend about how wise beyond his age he was, and how big his dick was, about how the smell of his room (tobacco mixed sweaty virility) inflamed her loins, etc.

Obama truly is patrician.

>DUDE WEED LMAO
>"the literary lifestyle"

...

Blooms canon? That's like 150 books right?

Not hard to accomplish at all if you like reading.

I wanted to argue against this and say he still had to deal with being a physically dark-skinned person in America, but reading about his biography, I gotta say this isn't too bad a post. Well-done, and thanks for giving me some knowledge about something I never much thought about or cared to look into.

Obama isn't some aesthete who's devoted his life to literature and to reading beautiful and literarily significant books, he's a politician, and he thus reads acclaimed works that seem relevant to the modern world/modern America. Moreover, he was pretty literate when he was younger, do I have to post the classic pasta of Obama's actual letter about T.S. Eliot? Anyway, once you get older, you can only read so much of the classics, it gets old. I know very literate middle-aged people who could just as well talk to you about T.S Eliot and Shakespeare but who still keep up with modern acclaimed -- and sometimes schlocky -- works just because. Veeky Forums's elitism is sad sometimes since it prevents them from getting any pleasure in reading. Also, it's not like we're going to stop making classics, some of the books that Veeky Forums makes fun of today/that Obama mentions may be remembered in 100 years. You may not even be qualified to say, since I bet most haven't read all these books.

>I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time.

>Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak.

>Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.)

>And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

Also this

Also, before people think me a shill for Obama, I didn't like him as a President. I'm just saying I don't find it surprising that a former president wants to stay in touch with socially relevant modern literature, and not seem out of touch by choosing the most obscure avant-garde/more consciously aesthetic works without that much of a wide readership and political and social significance.

I can't blame you for your attempt at a fair, sobered perspective. At the same time, I feel like it's a little too apologetic and condescending (to both us and Obama). I seriously doubt a single book on his top 2017 list will be remembered or valued even within a year, let alone any longer timeframe... At least French politicians read Houellebecq.

There's something fearful about the narrative of middle age mediocrity (perhaps an unfair or cruel way of looking at it). I'm young, though I don't really have an abundance of youthful energy - then again, isn't youth a strange combination of sloth and vigour? Maybe I just have too much of the former. But still, even though I'm depressed, I retain the vital lightning aspiration to quality, to vivid and intellectual things. It's sort of elitist, but all high standards are elitist. I don't let it get in the way of me consuming and enjoying pop culture too much, especially with others. It might even be a nice way to remind yourself of just how good *good things* are.

Was it AJP Taylor who said that Napoleon sacrificed Bonaparte the General to become Napoleon the Emperor? Perhaps Obama underwent a similar (if less dramatic) ossification. Could it have been avoided? Was it worth it? Can he still recover?

>Anne Frank will never know the glory of reading Faulkner

feelsbadman