The Man Demanding Barack Obama Read Mick Herron

Twice a year, Barack Obama releases a list of books he has allegedly read, and every time, the internet responds as though he has just posted a first draft to a writers' workshop.

It is a remarkable thing: a former president, a man who once commanded nuclear launch codes, is now being peer-reviewed by a regional sales manager from Swindon who reads exclusively on Kindle and still cannot figure out how to adjust the brightness.

The list itself arrives with the warm, curated glow of a farm-to-table restaurant menu—exactly the right amount of literary fiction, exactly the right amount of global south perspective, exactly one book about birds.

Then, like birds, within minutes a flock of middle-aged reply guys arrive, rolling up their sleeves to deliver notes.

This particular madness often descends upon people the moment they have sent their children off to university and are finally alone with a good Wi-Fi connection. 

This madness is not the madness of youth, which is kinetic and often involves jumping onto or over things.

No, this is a sedentary madness. The kind of madness that allows a 52-year-old in a fleece received free with a subscription to Gardeners’ World to sit at a kitchen table, and type, with the gravity of a man drafting the Treaty of Versailles: 

“Barack, love the book list this year, but you simply cannot overlook Mick Herron. The prose is superb.”

Barack. 

He calls him Barack. As if they are at a dinner party. As if Obama, the former leader of the free world, is hovering by the patio waiting for Dave from HR to weigh in on his summer reading.

Obama, to be clear, is not hovering. Obama is on a yacht, or a vineyard, or doing whatever it is exceptionally successful people do when they no longer have to pretend to care about the G7. He posted a list. A benign, algorithmically wholesome list of books, probably compiled by a team of people whose entire job is to make sure the list contains exactly the right amount of Toni Morrison. And yet there they are, the middle-aged reply guys of LinkedIn and Medium, treating the comment section like a receiving line at a wedding they weren’t invited to. “Thanks for the recommendation, Mr. President!” — as if he’s just handed them a campaign leaflet. “Have you tried the new Ian McEwan? Bit disappointing, if I’m honest.”

‘If I’m honest’. The rallying cry of the uninvited.

But it isn’t just books. Oh, no. The same man who cannot change a tire without calling his wife three times has, by lunch, formulated a comprehensive military strategy for the Middle East. He is a backseat driver to global conflict. He has never been to the Middle East, unless you count a flight connection in Dubai, but he has thoughts. 

“What they need to do,” he types, fingers sticky from a cinnamon roll, “is a pincer movement followed by a strategic withdrawal of soft power.” He is, in his mind, a field marshal. In reality, he is a man who earlier today got into a protracted argument with a self-service checkout.

Artificial Intelligence. Paradoxically, this same vanguard of geopolitical mastery lives in absolute, trembling terror of Artificial Intelligence. The very people who spent the last decade complaining that their printer wouldn’t connect to the Wi-Fi are now convinced that a chatbot is going to steal their soul. 

They hate AI with a holy, righteous passion, largely because they suspect it might write a slightly more coherent paragraph than they can, thereby threatening their self-appointed status as the supreme arbiters of human culture.

And then — then — there is murder.

Not his murder, obviously. He has not been murdered. But someone, somewhere, has been murdered, and the middle-aged internet has convened its court with a speed that would make the Vatican blush. Within seventeen minutes of a news alert, they have deduced motive, means, opportunity, and the exact psychological profile of a suspect whose name they have not yet learned to spell. “It’s always the boyfriend,” they declare, as if they have solved not merely this crime but crime itself. 

The velocity is the thing. The sheer, unrelenting velocity of it all.

There was a time, not very long ago — 1985, to be precise — when my grandfather would sit in a green webbed lawn chair, consume a lukewarm beer, and calmly declare that the newly installed speed bumps on Oak Street were a manifestation of creeping Marxist tyranny. It was a strongly voiced opinion, delivered with the serene confidence of a man who had never met a single person from the Soviet Union. The speed bumps did not alter their height in response, the house went quiet during grandfather’s nap, and the local pigeons continued to defecate on his front steps. The madness remained safely contained within the perimeter of his property.

Today, the lawn chair has been connected to the fiber-optic grid, and the results are catastrophic.

We have confused volume with expertise. He assumes that because he has read three paragraphs of a Guardian liveblog, he is now functionally indistinguishable from a UN special rapporteur. He will tell you, with the confidence of a man who has just discovered the caps lock key, exactly how a war should be de-escalated, exactly how a trial should be conducted, and exactly which books a former president should read next, and he will do all of this before his coffee has finished brewing.

And the worst part is that he expects a reply. He has not merely shouted into the void; he has shouted into the void and is now standing there, arms crossed, waiting for the void to shout back with a like. He has tagged Obama. He has used a hashtag. He has done everything short of sending a pigeon to Martha’s Vineyard, and he genuinely believes that this constitutes a dialogue.

It does not. It is not a dialogue. It is a man in a fleece, alone in a kitchen, telling a former president to read Mick Herron while a war rages somewhere he cannot spell and a murder trial unfolds in a courtroom he will never enter, and all of it is happening at a speed that would have made my grandfather’s deckchair catch fire.

For those who do urgently need to give an ex-President some pop culture recommendations, here is Barack Obama’s 2026 Summer Reading & Music List.