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Your evening longread: Barack Obama on his favourite novels - and writing his own books

We bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.

EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle. 

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

Barack Obama

The former US President talks about his new memoir, and about his love for books and writing throughout his life. 

(The New York Times, approx 14 mins reading time)

While in Chicago, Mr. Obama began writing short stories — melancholy, reflective tales inspired by some of the people he met as a community organizer. Those stories and the journals he was keeping would nurture the literary qualities that fuel “A Promised Land”: a keen sense of place and mood; searching efforts at self-assessment (like wondering whether his decision to run for president stemmed, in part, from a need “to prove myself worthy to a father who had abandoned me, live up to my mother’s starry-eyed expectations”); and a flair for creating sharply observed, Dickensian portraits of advisers, politicians and foreign leaders.

Read all the Evening Longreads here> 

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Aoife Barry
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