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MUST READS: Barack Obama

ON THURSDAY (Aug 15), former president Barack Obama took to social media to share his summer reading list, which featured an array of established authors and began with a tribute to the late Toni Morrison.

“To start, you can’t go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison,” Obama writes.

“Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye,Sula, everything else — they’re transcendent, all of them. You’ll be glad you read them.”

Obama has been a long-admirer of the novelist. In 2012, he awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the two highest honors the U.S. government presents to civilians.

Following the announcement of her death he shared a remembrance on social media branding Toni a “national treasure,” he wrote.

“Her writing was not just beautiful but meaningful — a challenge to our conscience and a call to greater empathy. She was as good a storyteller, as captivating, in person as she was on the page.”

Also on the list was Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which he describes as “a necessary read, detailing the way Jim Crow and mass incarceration tore apart lives and wrought consequences that ripple into today.”

The list includes three recently released works of fiction: Téa Obreht’s novel “Inland,” Lauren Wilkinson’s thriller “American Spy” and Ted Chiang’s short story collection “Exhalation,” which he calls “the best kind of science fiction.”

Three nonfiction books were also included on the list: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl<,i> and Stephanie Land’s Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive<,i>, that provides “a single mother’s personal, unflinching look at America’s class divide.”