As 2025 draws to a close, former US President Barack Obama has shared his annual lists of favourite books, movies and music, continuing a year-end tradition he began while in office. In his note accompanying the picks, Obama said he hopes audiences “find something new to enjoy” and invited recommendations in return.
Over the years, the lists have evolved into more than a personal playlist or reading log. These widely circulated cultural snapshots often serve as a window into the stories and voices that are making a significant impact in publishing, cinema, and pop culture.
Books: Serious themes, contemporary questions, and a few personal touches
Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025 mix narrative nonfiction with literary fiction, circling themes that recur across his recommendations: institutions and democracy, identity and belonging, memory, inequality and social power.
Several selections are explicitly rooted in public life and civic inquiry. Jill Lepore’s We the People reflects an ongoing interest in how democratic ideas are formed, contested, and reinterpreted across time. Beth Macy’s Paper Girl and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us similarly signal a focus on lived reality—how systems shape outcomes and how resilience forms in communities under strain.
On the fiction side, Susan Choi’s Flashlight and Zadie Smith’s Dead and Alive represent the list’s literary spine—work that prizes interiority, voice and complexity over easy resolution.
One title likely to stand out strongly for Indian readers is Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which appears on Obama’s year-end list and has also been highlighted in coverage as a notable Indian-origin inclusion.
Obama also adds a wry disclosure about one personal pick—Michelle Obama’s The Look—flagging, in effect, that even presidential reading lists can contain family pride.
Notably, he also repeats a “reminder” of his Summer 2025 reading list, which included Anita Desai’s Rosarita, among other titles—an overlap that reinforces how his recommendations often function as a running cultural diary across the year rather than a single December drop.
Obama’s Favourite Books of 2025 (as posted):
Paper Girl (Beth Macy); Flashlight (Susan Choi); We the People (Jill Lepore); The Wilderness (Angela Flournoy); There Is No Place for Us (Brian Goldstone); North Sun (Ethan Rutherford); 1929 (Andrew Ross Sorkin); The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Kiran Desai); Dead and Alive (Zadie Smith); What We Can Know (Ian McEwan); plus The Look (Michelle Obama).
Music: A playlist built on range—mainstream hits and global surprises
Obama’s Favourite Music of 2025 continues a long-running pattern: a playlist that moves easily across hip-hop, pop, indie, R&B and global music, mixing chart staples with selections that send listeners down new paths.
High-profile inclusions—Kendrick Lamar & SZA’s “Luther” and Drake’s “NOKIA”, for example—sit alongside contemporary pop and cross-border tracks such as BLACKPINK’s “JUMP” and Rosalía’s “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas.”
One of the most culturally distinctive inclusions is “Pasayadan” by Ganavya, which multiple reports have described as a contemporary rendition of a 13th-century Marathi devotional abhang associated with Sant Dnyaneshwar—an entry that stands out precisely because it does not arrive through the usual global pop pipeline.
The larger effect of the list is less about a single genre and more about a listening posture: curiosity without self-consciousness—where major radio names and deeply rooted traditional forms can sit on the same page.
Obama’s Favourite Music of 2025 (selected highlights):
“Nice to Each Other” (Olivia Dean); “Luther” (Kendrick Lamar & SZA); “TaTaTa” (Burna Boy ft. Travis Scott); “JUMP” (BLACKPINK); “Pasayadan” (Ganavya); “Abracadabra” (Lady Gaga); “NOKIA” (Drake), among others.
Movies: Character-first cinema and idea-driven storytelling
Obama’s Favourite Films of 2025 lean away from pure spectacle and toward movies that are often described as character-led, idea-forward, and tone-specific—the kind of films that reward attention to craft, pacing and performance.
The list includes One Battle After Another and Sinners, alongside titles like Hamnet, Sentimental Value, and Train Dreams—a cluster that suggests a preference for cinema that treats emotion, memory and moral ambiguity as subjects rather than side-effects.
Also notable is the presence of films with overtly political or conceptual frames—Orwell: 2+2=5, for instance—indicating that Obama’s film picks, like his books, often gravitate toward stories that interrogate power, truth and civic life.
Obama’s Favourite Films of 2025 (as posted):
One Battle After Another; Sinners; It Was Just an Accident; Hamnet; Sentimental Value; No Other Choice; The Secret Agent; Train Dreams; Jay Kelly; Good Fortune; Orwell: 2+2=5.
Why the lists still matter
Obama’s year-end favourites persist because they function as a low-stakes public ritual: not a definitive canon, but a curated invitation. They often nudge attention toward books and music that might otherwise remain niche, while also confirming that mass culture—pop hits, global superstars, and mainstream cinema—still has a place on the list.
In that sense, the 2025 selections are less a prescription of taste than a snapshot of cultural attentiveness: wide-ranging, globally curious, and comfortable moving between the popular and the unexpected.
By – Charu