At the Labour party conference Andy Burnham revealed that Hamlet, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Tony Harrison’s poem V are his favourite works of literature. The UK’s first prime minister with an English literature degree was not the only political figure sharing his book choices last week. Barack Obama, the US’s most literary president since Abraham Lincoln, launched a new podcast in which he discusses six books that shaped him with writer friends.
First up was the actor – and recently turned short story writer – Tom Hanks on Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, a meditation on faith, fatherhood and forgiveness in the form of a letter written by a 76-year-old pastor to his son. It was an unabashedly highbrow start. With the exception of John le Carré’s cold war classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Mr Obama’s selections are American: Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, James Baldwin’s essays The Fire Next Time and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Questions of democracy, race, power and violence are all here.
The former president’s summer and end-of-year reading lists are known for having an “Obama effect” on sales. This season’s picks include the Booker-shortlisted The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, of whom he has long been a fan. His podcast, A Great Book with Barack Obama, joins a crowded arena. Established celebrity book clubs include those run by Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon in the US and Richard and Judy in the UK. These are now competing with starry newcomers, such as Dua Lipa’s Service95, appealing to gen Z readers. The British singer’s conversations with bookish heavyweights have seen her hailed as “the best literary interviewer” of our time. Audiences can decide for themselves this month when she is curator and host of the London literature Festival at the Southbank Centre, with guests including Zadie Smith.
With reading for pleasure among young people at its lowest level in two decades, high-profile champions have an important role to play – even if celebrity endorsements are sometimes accompanied by a whiff of elitism. Back in 2001, Jonathan Franzen caused a furore by snubbing an invitation for The Corrections to be featured on Oprah’s Book Club, deriding her choices as “schmaltzy” and “one-dimensional”. The announcement that Lipa would give the Booker prize ceremony speech in 2022 raised eyebrows in the industry. Yet a recommendation from Winfrey or Lipa can catapult a novel on to the bestseller lists.
You don’t need to be a pop star or president to become a literary tastemaker. Online communities such as BookTok and Bookstagram have democratised the book world. Everyone can be a critic today. As the rise of romantasy novels shows, bookfluencers are a powerful new force in publishing.
But in a speeded-up world, books podcasts are a balm for the soul. They can boost debuts, resurface old classics and rescue forgotten treasures. The path from politics to podcasting is now a well-trodden one. But an in-depth literary podcast from a former US president is a first, and not likely to be seconded anytime soon. “There are jokes about the Trump library,” Robinson quipped in 2018. “Because there won’t be any books in there.” For Mr Obama, reading helps to create “a moral framework” and is “a way of understanding the challenges of the moment”. Rarely have literary-minded leaders been so urgently needed.
