Year-End Lists

Barack Obama: Favorite Books of 2021, as posted to Twitter

[see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018 • 2017]

• Matrix
  Lauren Groff
• How the Word Is Passed

  A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
  Clint Smith
• The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
  Dawnie Walton
• The Lincoln Highway
  Amor Towles
• Invisible Child

  Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City
  Andrea Elliott
• Harlem Shuffle
  Colson Whitehead
• Cloud Cuckoo Land
  Anthony Doerr
• These Precious Days
  Ann Patchett
• Crying in H Mart
  Michelle Zauner
• Aftershocks
  Nadia Owusu
• Crossroads
  Jonathan Franzen
• The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
  Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
• Beautiful Country
  Qian Julie Wang

Books I Recommended Earlier This Year

• At Night All Blood Is Black
  David Diop
• Land of Big Numbers
  Te-Ping Chen
• Empire of Pain

  The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
  Patrick Radden Keefe
• Project Hail Mary
  Andy Weir
• When We Cease to Understand the World
  Benjamin Labatut
• Under a White Sky

  The Nature of the Future
  Elizabeth Kolbert
• Things We Lost to the Water
  Eric Nguyen
• Leave the World Behind
  Rumaan Alam
• Klara and the Sun
  Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Sweetness of Water
  Nathan Harris
• Intimacies
  Katie Kitamura