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St. Paul, Minn.

All the president's books

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Barack and Michelle Obama
US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama read a book to 2nd graders at the Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, DC, February 3, 2009.
Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Much has been made of President Obama's love of books, from his reading of Hemingway as a teenager to his study of biographies on Lincoln and FDR. Midmorning looks at other books that should be on the new president's reading list.

Books recommended for President Obama's reading list:

  • "The Art of Raising a Puppy" by the Monks of New Skete

  • "Animals Make Us Human" by Temple Grandin

  • "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan

  • "Three Cups of Tea" by Greg Mortenson

  • "The Great Depression" by Michael Bernstein

  • "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North" by Thomas Sugrue

  • "Absalom, Absalom!" by William Faulkner

  • "Son of the Morning Star: Custer and Little Big Horn" by Evan S. Connell

  • "The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence" by Robert J. Samuelson

  • "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century" by Jonathan Zimmerman

  • "All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s" by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman

  • "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller

  • "A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nuorish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World's Sacred Texts" by Leo Tolstoy and Peter Sekirin

  • "To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine" by Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro

  • "A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America" by Brian Balogh

  • "A Series of Unfortunate Events, Books 1-13" by Lemony Snicket

  • "A Blade of Grass" by Lewis Desoto

  • "Beyond Fossil Fools: The Roadmap to Energy Independence" by 2040

  • "The Winking Fox" by Renee Defourneaus

  • "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World" by Vicki Myron

  • "A Perfect Peace" by Amos Oz

  • "The Question of Palestine" by Edward Said

  • "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand

  • "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee

  • "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn

  • "Predictably Irrational" by Daniel Ariely

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Barack and Michelle Obama
US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama read a book to 2nd graders at the Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, DC, February 3, 2009.
Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images