President Obama's Summer Reading List

It’s nearing the end of August in an election off-year. The President has gone away on his customary vacation. Time, then, for a break from the accumulating bad news of this summer, and for the White House’s annual announcement of Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard reading list. This year, as has been noted, the list is heavy on fiction, though that’s no real surprise from Obama, who during his Presidency has been linked to (what politicians are reading is a kind of nerdy equivalent to the gossip about whom celebrities are dating) zeitgeist literary best-sellers as Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” David Mitchell’s “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” and Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland.”