Íme Barack Obama 2022-es nyári olvasmánylistája, avagy a volt amerikai elnök minden nyáron közzéteszi a kedvenceit, így ez most sem maradhatott el. Obama nemcsak olvas, hanem zenét hallgat, filmeket néz – a kedvenceit pedig közzéteszi minden kategóriában. Ebben a bejegyzésben az idei kedvenc könyveit mutatom be közelebbről.
Barack Obama 2022-es nyári olvasmánylistája
Barack Obama 2022-es nyári olvasmánylistájáról eddig egyetlen könyv sem jelent meg magyarul. A paradicsomba és az Ezüstfény is megjelenésre vár a cikk írásakor, azonban előbbinek személy szerint nagyon örülök. Hanya Yanagiharától olvastam az Egy kis életet, mely elég megrázó, azonban csodálatos regény. A listában felbukkan Silvia Moreno-Garcia is, akitől a Mexikói rémtörténetet olvastam, s noha nem vett le a lábamról, mindenképp adni akarok még egy esélyt a szerzőnek. Lehet pont a Velvet Was the Nighttal lenne érdemes próbálkozni?
Tulajdonképpen Barack Obama 2022-es nyári olvasmánylistája nem nagy meglepetés, hiszen a politika és a kisebbségekről szóló regények adják a gerincét. Találni thrillert és kémregényt is a listán, melyek azon olvasóknak lehet felüdülés, akik például a molyos listákat a rengeteg young adult regény miatt nem kedvelik.
Nézzük Barack Obama 2022-es nyári olvasmánylistája könyveit!
Hanya Yanagihara: A paradicsomba
Hanya Yanagihara merész és briliáns regénye három évszázadot ölel fel, három alternatív Amerikában mesél szeretőkről, családról, veszteségről és az utópia mindig elillanó ígéretéről.
1893, New York, Szabad Államok. Az Egyesült Államokon belül létrejött, önálló Szabad Államokban a polgárok úgy és azzal élnek, akivel akarnak. Kívülről legalább is így tűnik. A város legelőkelőbb családjának sarja nem találja helyét a világban, ráadásul titokzatos betegség is gyötri. Nagyapja vagyonos kérőt szemel ki neki, ám ő leküzdhetetlen vonzalmat táplál egy zenetanár iránt.
1993, Manhattan. Az AIDS-járvány sújtotta városban egy fiatal hawaii férfi viszonyt kezd jóval idősebb és tehetősebb főnökével. De nem csak a külvilág előtt kell titkolózniuk; a királyi vérből származó David igyekszik társa előtt leplezni zaklatott gyerekkorát és apja szerencsétlen sorsát is.
2093, New York. Egy totalitárius rendszer mindennapjainak részévé válnak a természeti katasztrófák és a járványok. Az egyik nagyhatalmú tudós sérült unokája nagyapja nélkül próbál boldogulni az életben – és rájönni férje eltűnéseinek rejtélyére.
Hanya Yanagihara sokarcú triptichonjának részletei lebilincselően fonódnak össze és íródnak egymásra, visszatérő szereplői, témái és motívumai szakadatlanul újraértelmezik és gazdagítják egymást. A korábban szilárdnak hitt fogalmak – betegség, gyógyulás, rassz, család, nemzet, hatalom – viszonylagossá és cseppfolyóssá válnak, s olyan örvénybe rántják az olvasót, amelyben kénytelen lesz ő maga is újragondolni világképe sarokköveit. A paradicsomba csodálatosan megírt századvégi regény, de mindenekfelett egy érzelmi géniusz munkája. Yanagihara ismeri a kényszerítő vágyat, hogy megvédjük szeretteinket – partnerünket, szeretőnket, gyermekeinket, barátainkat, családunkat, sőt polgártársainkat is -, és azt a fájdalmat is, ha mindez nem lehetséges. A paradicsomba grandiózus gondolatkísérlet, az ember lehetőségeinek és határainak szabad szellemű, ugyanakkor könyörtelen feltérképezése.
“Csak azok akarnak ilyen megszállottan halhatatlanok lenni, akik eséllyel reménykednek abban, hogy halhatatlanná váljanak a történelemben. Mi, többiek túlságosan el vagyunk foglalva azzal, hogy túléljük a következő napot.”
John le Carré: Ezüstfény
Utolsó regényében John le Carré figyelme a titkosszolgálat belső működésére irányul: arra a világra, amely hatvan éven át meghatározta írásművészetét.
Julian Lawndsley maga mögött hagyta menő londoni állását egy nyugodtabb élet kedvéért, és egy tengerparti kisvárosba költözött, hogy könyvesboltot nyisson. Egy este, nem sokkal azután, hogy a városba érkezett, különös látogatója akad: Edward, a lengyel emigráns, aki a városszéli birtokon, Ezüstfényben él. Gyanúsan sokat tud Julian családjáról, és mintha túl nagy figyelmet szentelne a férfi szerény vállalkozásának.
Mindeközben Londonban a titkosszolgálat egyik vezetője levelet kap, amelyben arra figyelmeztetik, hogy valaki a Szolgálat információit szivárogtatja. A nyomok éppen abba az álmos kisvárosba vezetnek, ahol Julian él.
Az Ezüstfény az ártatlanság és a tapasztalás, a közszolgálat és a személyes erkölcsök találkozásának megkapó története. John le Carré, korunk legnagyobb krónikása, arra keresi a választ utánozhatatlan hangon írt regényében, hogy mivel tartozunk azoknak, akik a legközelebb állnak hozzánk.
Emily St. John Mandel: Sea of Tranquility
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Ezra Klein: Why We’re Polarized
America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this book, journalist Ezra Klein reveals how that system is polarizing us—and how we are polarizing it—with disastrous results.
In Why We’re Polarized, Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, this book offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture.
America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.
Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the twentieth century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.
This is a revelatory book that will change how you look at politics, and perhaps at yourself.
Jennifer Egan: The Candy House
From one of the most dazzling and iconic writers of our time and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity, privacy, and meaning in a world where our memories are no longer our own—featuring characters from A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or “externalizing” memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious—that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others—has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.
Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold, brilliant imagining of a world that is moments away. With a focus on social media, gaming, and alternate worlds, you can almost experience moving among dimensions in a role-playing game. Egan delivers a fierce and exhilarating testament to the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.
Hanif Abdurraqib: A Little Devil in America – In Praise of Black Performance
At the March on Washington, Josephine Baker reflected on her life and her legacy. She had spent decades as one of the most successful entertainers in the world, but, she told the crowd, „I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too”. Inspired by these words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a stirring meditation on Black performance in the modern age, in which culture, history and his own lived experience collide.
With sharp insight, humour and heart, Abdurraqib explores a sequence of iconic and intimate performances that take him from mid-century Paris to the moon – and back down again, to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. Each one, he shows, has layers of resonance across Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and his own personal history of love and grief – whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds of ‘Gimme Shelter’ in which Merry Clayton sings, or the magnificent hours of Aretha Franklin’s homegoing; Beyoncé’s Super Bowl show or a schoolyard fistfight; Dave Chapelle’s skits or a game of spades among friends.
Charmaine Wilkerson: Black Cake
In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings deal with their mother’s death and her hidden past–a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake.
We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child, challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage, and themselves.
Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names, can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.
Lan Samantha Chang: The Family Chao
The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant’s delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family’s secrets and simmering resentments erupt at last.
Before long, brash, charismatic, and tyrannical patriarch Leo is found dead—presumed murdered—and his sons find they’ve drawn the exacting gaze of the entire town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers: Dagou, the restaurant’s reckless head chef; Ming, financially successful but personally tortured; and the youngest, gentle but lost college student James. As the spotlight on the brothers tightens—and the family dog meets an unexpected fate—Dagou, Ming, and James must reckon with the legacy of their father’s outsized appetites and their own future survival.
Brimming with heartbreak, comedy, and suspense, The Family Chao offers a kaleidoscopic, highly entertaining portrait of a Chinese American family grappling with the dark undercurrents of a seemingly pleasant small town.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Velvet Was the Night
Mexico in the 1970s is a dangerous country, even for Maite, a secretary who spends her life seeking the romance found in cheap comic books and ignoring the activists protesting around the city. When her next-door neighbor, the beautiful art student Leonora, disappears under suspicious circumstances, Maite finds herself searching for the missing woman—and journeying deeper into Leonora’s secret life of student radicals and dissidents.
Mexico in the 1970s is a politically fraught land, even for Elvis, a goon with a passion for rock ’n’ roll who knows more about kidney-smashing than intrigue. When Elvis is assigned to find Leonora, he begins a blood-soaked search for the woman—and his soul.
Swirling in parallel trajectories, Maite and Elvis attempt to discover the truth behind Leonora’s disappearance, encountering hitmen, government agents, and Russian spies. Because Mexico in the 1970s is a noir where life is cheap and the price of truth is high.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic comes a simmering historical noir about a daydreaming secretary, a lonesome enforcer, and the mystery of the missing woman they’re both desperate to find.
Antoine Wilson: Mouth to Mouth
In a first-class lounge at JFK airport, our narrator listens as Jeff Cook, a former classmate he only vaguely remembers, shares the uncanny story of his adult life—a life that changed course years before, the moment he resuscitated a drowning man.
Jeff reveals that after that traumatic, galvanizing morning on the beach, he was compelled to learn more about the man whose life he had saved, convinced that their fates were now entwined. But are we agents of our fate—or are we its pawns? Upon discovering that the man is renowned art dealer Francis Arsenault, Jeff begins to surreptitiously visit his Beverly Hills gallery. Although Francis does not seem to recognize him as the man who saved his life, he nevertheless casts his legendary eye on Jeff and sees something worthy. He takes the younger man under his wing, initiating him into his world, where knowledge, taste, and access are currency; a world where value is constantly shifting and calling into question what is real, and what matters. The paths of the two men come together and diverge in dizzying ways until the novel’s staggering ending.
Sly, suspenseful, and engrossing, Mouth to Mouth masterfully blurs the line between opportunity and exploitation, self-respect and self-delusion, fact and fiction—exposing the myriad ways we deceive each other, and ourselves.
Yascha Mounk: The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure
From one of our sharpest and most important political thinkers, a brilliant big-picture vision of the greatest challenge of our time–how to bridge the bitter divides within diverse democracies enough for them to remain stable and functional
Some democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time.
Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be able to integrate in harmony, celebrating their differences without essentializing them. But Mounk shows us that the past can offer crucial insights for how to do better in the future. There is real reason for hope.
The Great Experiment is that rare book that offers both a profound understanding of an urgent problem and genuine hope for our human capacity to solve it. As Mounk contends, giving up on the prospects of building fair and thriving diverse democracies is simply not an option–and that is why we must strive to realize a more ambitious vision for the future of our societies.
Jessamine Chan: The School for Good Mothers
In this taut and explosive debut novel, one lapse in judgement lands a young mother in a government reform program where custody of her child hangs in the balance.
Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. What’s worse is she can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with their angelic daughter Harriet does Frida finally feel she’s attained the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she’s just enough.
Until Frida has a horrible day.
The state has its eyes on mothers like Frida — ones who check their phones while their kids are on the playground; who let their children walk home alone; in other words, mothers who only have one lapse of judgement. Now, a host of government officials will determine if Frida is a candidate for a Big Brother-like institution that measures the success or failure of a mother’s devotion. Faced with the possibility of losing Harriet, Frida must prove that she can live up to the standards set for mothers — that she can learn to be good.
This propulsive, witty page-turner explores the perils of “perfect” upper-middle-class parenting, the violence enacted upon women by the state and each other, and the boundless love a mother has for her daughter.
S.A. Cosby: Razorblade Tears
A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance.
Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid.
The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah’s white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss.
Derek’s father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy.
Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.
Chris Herring: Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks
The definitive history of the 1990s New York Knicks, illustrating how Pat Riley, Patrick Ewing, John Starks, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason resurrected the iconic franchise through oppressive physicality and unmatched grit.
For nearly an entire generation, the New York Knicks have been a laughingstock franchise. Since 2001, they’ve spent more money, lost more games, and won fewer playoff series than any other NBA team.
But during the preceding era, the Big Apple had a club it was madly in love with—one that earned respect not only by winning, but through brute force. The Knicks were always looking for fights, often at the encouragement of Pat Riley. They fought opposing players. They fought each other. Hell, they even occasionally fought their own coaches.
The NBA didn’t take kindly to their fighting spirit. Within two years, league officials moved to alter several rules to stop New York from turning its basketball games into bloody mudwrestling matches. Nevertheless, as the 1990s progressed, the Knicks endeared themselves to millions of fans; not for how much they won, but for their colorful cast of characters and their hardworking mentality.
Blood in the Garden is a portrait filled with eye-opening details that have never been shared before, revealing the full story of the franchise in the midst of the NBA’s golden era. And rest assured, no punches will be pulled. Which is just how those rough-and-tumble Knicks would like it.
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