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.
