Paper Trail

Barack Obama picks his favorite books of 2021; writers remember bell hooks


Barack Obama. Photo: Pete Souza.

Barack Obama has released his list of the best books he read in 2021. The former president’s picks include Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, Clint Smith’s How the World is Passed, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, and more.

At The Cut, a roundup of writers remembering bell hooks on Twitter; at the New Yorker, Hua Hsu considers hooks’s legacy; at Essence, a list of some of her greatest books.

The Brooklyn Rail selects the best art books of 2021.

In the Washington Post, Stephen J. Adler and Bruce D. Brown write about a New York court decision that prevented the New York Times from publishing stories based on leaked memos from the right-wing group Project Veritas. The court order has stood for twenty-eight days, which, Adler and Brown argue, sets a dangerous precedent: “The First Amendment does not tolerate the idea that speech can be censored in advance, even if it might be punished after the fact.”

For Boston Review, Douglas Shadle reviews two new books on Black performance and classical music: Kira Thurman’s Singing Like Germans and Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák’s Prophecy. The former book complicates the latter’s proposition of how classical music “stayed white” by recovering stories of Black musicians and composers. Shadle writes: “Thurman explains that researching the lives featured in Singing Like Germans felt like ‘chasing ghosts’ through scant evidence; Horowitz barely peered through the front door, leaving significant Black voices ‘on the sidelines of the sidelines,’ as Daphne Brooks puts it in her new book, Liner Notes for the Revolution.”

The LARB has posted the transcript of a recent conversation between Andrea Long Chu, K. Austin Collins, Lauren Michele Jackson, and Christine Smallwood about leaving academia.