President Obama and his family are currently vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, a place the Obamas have traveled to six times during their time in the White House. The first family will be on the island for 16 days, so the president came prepared with an extensive summer reading list.
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What's on the president's list? Here are the books Obama has with him, according to a White House official:
- "All That Is," by James Salter
- "All The Light We Cannot See," by Anthony Doerr
- "The Sixth Extinction," by Elizabeth Kolbert
- "The Lowland," by Jhumpa Lahiri
- "Between The World and Me," by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- "Washington: A Life," by Ron Chernow
Of the books, three are fiction ("All That Is," "All The Light We Cannot See" and "The Lowland") and three are nonfiction -- "Between the World and Me," which covers race and black America; "The Sixth Extinction," which covers "the current biodiversity crisis;" and "Washington: A Life," which is a biography of the first president, George Washington.
Obama previously met Coates, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, at an off-the-record White House meeting with liberal writers in 2013. According to a recent New York magazine profile of Coates, after the meeting, Obama pulled Coates aside and told him that a critical piece Coates had written about the president was unfair. The president then reportedly told the author, "Don't despair."