What is President Obama Reading?

According to the New York Times, President Obama is heartily sick of dense briefing books.  While filled with facts and figures that demand solutions, required  presidential reading does not fire up the imagination.  Joseph O'Neill remedied all that with a ready to go book.  Netherland: A Novel is what Obama reads in his new Treaty Room office digs inside the private residence.

It is a meaty novel from an Irish author who explores the complexities of diversity in an immigrants traumatic life who shares his thoughts with some one so unlike himself that shares the immigrant experience.  Layered atop that is a touch of tilting at cricket windmills as the protagonist rebounds from the bumps in his life journey.  Book sales for the award winning book ought to jump significantly with the Obama acknowledgment.  Not sure yet of Obama will give books an Oprah-like swarm affect. The book is older than the Obama puppy by about 6 months.  In the past year several awards accrued to Netherland.

Not exactly sure where the book Hugo Chavez gave him falls in the line up.  One thing is clear, President Obama would have to get an English version if he was so inclined.

Other nonfiction books by Pultizer Prize Winner Steven Coll and Fareed Zakaria's latest, The Post-American World, have been seen in Obama's hands.  Click here for books that shaped Barack Obama's youthful thinking while living the life that led to his own Grammy-winning memoir, Dreams from My Father.