Everyone -- at least everyone in the world of books -- is almost as eager to know Barack Obama's reading habits as his plans for the economy or U.S. foreign policy.
I'm aware that Karl Rove is constantly trying to tell us how surprisingly well-read President Bush is (this is the last time I'll need to capitalize the P in President when mentioning him). The former White House eminence grise claims that the Chief read 95 books in 2006 and 51 the following year. Excuse me, but I'm skeptical: When does somebody with that (presumed) workload have time to read a book-and-a-half a week? I can believe that many have been put in front of him, or that some staffer might have briefed him on them, but not that he read them all.
Unless they were comic books.
Plus, he simply didn't talk about books, or refer to them. He doesn't seem bookish. He might have been a something-stained wretch, but it was certainly not ink.
Obama, on the other hand, is eager to talk about books, books he's read, books that have shaped him. And, of course, he's written two bestselling books entirely unghosted, i.e., all by himself, a rarity among political figures. By the way, the redoubtable used-book site Abebooks reports that signed copies are so collectible that one of Dreams From My Father recently went for $5,500 (U.S.).
Remember the ado when Obama was photographed with Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, a book about the decline of the U.S. as world power? The cynical might say: self-promoting photo-op. But I think it's a book he really read and considered.
And when The New York Times asked him for a list of writers and books that were important to him, Obama offered a rainbow coalition of titles black and white, American and foreign: Mark Twain (a very undervalued writer on race) and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Abe Lincoln and James Baldwin. You'd expect W.E.B. DuBois's Souls of Black Folk and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, but might be surprised by Obama's including books by Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook), Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory) and Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward). Hemingway, Melville, Shakespeare and Philip Roth also crop up. In non-fiction, there's Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but also Working, one of a sequence of potent oral histories by Obama's fellow Chicagoan Studs Terkel, who died Oct. 31.
After the election, Obama reinforced his keep-your-enemies-close views with frequent reference to Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, about how Lincoln (another Illinois inspiration) did exactly that in his cabinet choices.
Obama frequently mentions Morrison's Song of Solomon. But if you want to show solidarity with our American neighbours on the eve of his quasi-coronation (I'd hate to have so much collective hope riding on me, but then, that's reason #137 why I'm not a politician), you couldn't do much better than to go back to two great novels about the black male experience, U.S.-style.
Ralph Ellison (Ralph Waldo Ellison, actually) may have intended Invisible Man , which won the National Book Award in 1953, less as social protest than as an experimental, symbolist novel, jazz on the page. Still, the issues facing black America are inescapably there, including identity and black nationalism and the possibility of reform. Ellison's brilliant and highly allusive extended riff of a novel, the only one he published during his lifetime (1914-1994), features, like its H.G. Wells namesake, an unnamed protagonist, in this case a socially invisible black man. A demanding but very rewarding work.
A much more direct-to-the-bone work is Native Son , a 1940 novel by Richard Wright (1908-1960). It's the tale of Bigger Thomas, a troubled youth on Chicago's South Side who accidentally kills a white woman and then, on the run, murders his girlfriend. Plunging frighteningly deep inside Bigger's mind, Wright offers a shattering look at a system in which racism and social injustice are so deeply embedded that the question of free will becomes almost meaningless. "No American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull," Wright later wrote.
Both novels were critical and financial successes. But more important, both changed public perceptions. For that reason alone, never mind their literary qualities, they're among the most important books of the 20th century.
