Barack Obama is turning a lifelong love of reading into a podcast. The former president has announced a new Audible series called “A Great Book with Barack Obama,” a six-episode show in which he digs into the novels that shaped how he sees the world. Announced this week, the series debuts September 24.
A Reader Long Before He Was a President
Obama has never hidden the fact that books are central to who he is. Long before he entered politics, he was a voracious reader, and during and after his time in the White House his summer and end-of-year reading lists became cultural events in their own right. Fans waited for them, bookstores stocked up on them, and authors saw their sales spike overnight.
Now he is giving that habit a format of its own. The podcast is produced through Higher Ground, the media company he founded with Michelle Obama, which has already built a track record in audio, film, and television. This time the subject is simple and personal: the books that stuck with him.
Six Books, Six Conversations
The series runs six episodes, and each one centers on a single book Obama says helped shape his worldview. He is not doing it alone, and there is no permanent co-host. Instead, a different guest joins him for each episode, so every conversation brings a fresh voice and a new angle into the room.
The six titles read like a syllabus for a thoughtful life. They are James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” and John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” Together they range across race and identity, faith and memory, ambition and power, loyalty and betrayal.
Obama has described these as the books that “helped me figure out who I am and what I believe.” It is a striking admission from a man whose own memoirs have sold millions: rather than pointing to his own writing, he is pointing back to the authors who formed him.
Why It Matters
The series arrives as audio storytelling continues to boom, and it will stream exclusively on Audible. For Higher Ground, it is another entry in a steady run of cultural projects built around conversation rather than combat. There is no debate stage here, no cable-news crossfire, just a serious reader talking about the stories that stayed with him.
It also lands at a moment when many people say they read less than they used to, crowded out by feeds and short clips. A former president spending six episodes making the case for deep, unhurried reading is a quiet counterargument to that trend.
For readers, the show is an open invitation. Anyone who wants to follow along can pick up the same six novels and read them before, or alongside, each episode. Whether or not you share Obama’s politics, the premise is universal: the right book, at the right time, can change how you understand yourself and the world. When the series debuts on September 24, listeners will get to hear exactly which books did that for him.
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