11/11/08

Barack Obama and The Golden Notebook

OK, so we just launched The Golden Notebook project, which will be gathering momentum in the coming weeks (we hope). I set up a Google Alert to keep abreast of links to the site, and what people think of it. (So far, so good).

One thing I didn’t expect was the endorsement, reported in today’s Evening Standard, of the 44th President of the USA. Apparently, Barack Obama considers Lessing’s masterpiece to be one of the most influential books.

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. [...]

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.

Perhaps we should have added him to the list of readers? And wouldn’t it be great if he read along with the project?

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Apt Studio work.

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