Barack Obama releases list of his favourite books of 2019

Former US president Barack Obama has released a list of his favorite books of 2019, the latest in his annual tradition for sharing his curated cultural highlights of the year.

The list of 19 fiction and non-fiction titles encompasses a range of subjects from surveillance capitalism and the attention economy to feminism and race in Britain, and includes the work of a writer dubbed “the first great millennial novelist”.

As we wind down 2019, I wanted to share with you my annual list of favorites that made the last year a little brighter. We’ll start with books today — movies and music coming soon. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.

Among Obama’s picks for 2019 were:

• The Yellow House by Sarah M Broom, described by writer Casey Cep as a “beautiful memoir, and it gives you a rich and complex portrait of the city” of New Orleans.
• Cep’s own latest work, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, an account of Lee’s lost true-crime book
• How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
• The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple
• Normal People by Sally Rooney

Obama also included a list of 19 other books he recommended throughout the year.

The former US president began publishing lists of book recommendations in 2015, while he was still in office. Donald Trump has said he does not have time to read, but often uses his Twitter account to promote books that praise his administration.

SOURCE: The Guardian