Obama’s 2025 Summer Reading List Features Anita Desai’s ‘Rosarita’

Photos: Obama Foundation

India-West News Desk

WASHINGTON, DC – Former President Barack Obama has unveiled his much-anticipated 2025 summer reading list, a blend of biography, politics, and fiction, and this year’s selection carries a luminous work: ‘Rosarita’, a novella by acclaimed writer Anita Desai.

Obama, who has made an annual tradition of sharing his summer reads with the public, paired the announcement with handwritten notes reflecting on each book. Of ‘Rosarita’, he wrote: “a short, beautiful novella about a woman’s discovery of her mother’s secret past.”

For Desai, now 88, the recognition is another chapter in a career marked by quiet brilliance. Author of modern classics like ‘Clear Light of Day’ and ‘Fasting, Feasting’, she has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times and remains one of India’s most celebrated literary voices. Obama’s mention may draw a fresh wave of readers to her work — particularly to ‘Rosarita’, which has often been described as haunting and elegiac.

The story, set in San Miguel, Mexico, follows Bonita, a young student relishing her solitude as she learns Spanish. Her quiet life is unsettled when a stranger insists she is the mirror image of her mother — a woman who, the stranger claims, once lived in Mexico as an artist. Convinced her mother never painted, Bonita resists at first, but the revelation threatens to redraw her family’s past, entwining memory, grief, and identity in Desai’s characteristically lyrical style. Critics have praised her prose for its atmosphere and restraint: The Times once called her writing “bewitchingly beautiful,” while the New Statesman described it as “profoundly elegiac.”

Obama framed his reading list not only as personal reflection but also as an invitation to a wider conversation. “Reading has always been an important part of my journey,” he wrote, noting that the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago will open a new branch of the city’s public library next year. “For now, I figured I’d share some of the books I’ve read recently, along with some notes about why I liked them — and why you might, too.”

Other titles on Obama’s list include Ron Chernow’s ‘Mark Twain’, which he called “a comprehensive biography of one of the most important writers and social commentators in American history”; Madeleine Thien’s ‘The Book of Records’, “a beautiful fable about migration, memory, and the struggle to recognise our common humanity”; and S.A. Cosby’s ‘King of Ashes’, praised as “a story of family, ambition and corruption in a racially charged and violent South.”

His non-fiction selections echo familiar Obama themes of governance, democracy, and social change. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s ‘Abundance’ was dubbed “a must-read for progressives,” while Michael Lewis’s ‘Who is Government?’ is, in his words, “a timely reminder of the quiet dedication and skill” of public servants. Chris Hayes’s ‘The Sirens’ Call’, meanwhile, serves as “a useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy.”

In typical fashion, Obama closed his list with a note of camaraderie: he admitted he hadn’t put together a summer playlist this year, inviting readers to send him songs for his year-end list instead.

For book lovers, though, this year’s offering may already be playlist enough — a set of voices ranging from Twain to Thien, Cosby to Desai, that continues to map the former president’s literary compass.