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How will Barack Obama bond with Gordon Brown and David Cameron when it comes to literary tastes? Thanks to his Facebook page, we learn that the 44th president-elect's favourite books are Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Moby-Dick, Shakespeare's Tragedies, Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch (the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Martin Luther King), Abraham Lincoln's Collected Writings, Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the Bible. In philosophy and theology, Obama mentions Friedrich Nietzsche, Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich - which seems to echo his view that while life is bad, it's not that bad and there is cause for hope. Yes, we can.
But asked by the New York Times for the books that were most "significant" to him Obama came up with more surprising nominations: Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward - and Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American.
Just when everybody thought Greene had gone out of fashion, Obama comes back to rehabilitate him. Not, presumably, that he would approve of his lifestyle. Since his death in 1991 Greene has been exposed by a succession of biographers as a monstrous philanderer. When not making love to his mistress, Catherine Walston, behind church altars around Europe, he would have her stub cigarettes out on his body and on one occasion he scribbled down for her a list of his 47 favourite whores (he gave them nicknames such as "Russian boot" and "beautiful bottom in S Kensington").
Gordon Brown's tastes have always been suspiciously ecumenical - Orwell, Milton, Tennyson, Tolstoy, Wordsworth, Camus, Sartre, HG Wells, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Ian Rankin are among his favourites - but few if any American novelists have ever made it onto his greatest hits list. Obama's praise for Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiment means at least they have some common ground: Adam Smith, like the Prime Minister, came from Kirkcaldy. But Brown certainly hasn't mentioned Graham Greene.
Obama's fondness for Greene must give David Cameron a head start at the White House: the Tory leader has already gone on record saying that Greene is his favourite novelist. In Cameron on Cameron, published this year, the Tory leader revealed that "I went through a manic Graham Greene phase and read every single novel. In fact I'm quite looking forward one day to reading them all again because I've forgotten them. I just think he is wonderful, brilliant." But he said his favourite Greene novel would be either Our Man in Havana or The End of the Affair. So he'd better get rereading the back catalogue before he gets that White House invitation.
Reader views (1)
It is good that the US citizens are interested in the books that their Presidents read or have read.
That is an interest I would like to see in Kenyan citizens, and indeed, the whole of Africa.
I think books help develop an individual's thinking and communication abilities aside from developing the empathy that a person needs to be an effective leader of men and women.
They do also help a person consolidate his thoughts regarding the way society should run.
I have been particularly interested in Obama partly because his thoughts on the issues that are have been a source of anxiety in America and his ability to verbalise those anxities and how to grapple with them
My prayer that a time will come when Africa will follow their leaders based on the strength of their ideas and their potential to address their changing anxieties.
BUHERE
- Kennedy Buhere, Nairobi--Kenya
