On his Facebook page, Obama says his favorite books include "Moby-Dick," Ralph Waldo Emerson’s "Self-Reliance," Lincoln’s collected writings, and “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,” a volume by Taylor Branch about the civil rights movement.
Elsewhere, he identified himself as a fan of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” which is widely cited as the book that made him pick his onetime political rival Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Obama identified Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” as a book that inspires him. Curiously, he considered “the tragedies of William Shakespeare” inspiring as well. He also, of course, counts The Bible among his favorite books.