Barack Obama on "The Three-Body Problem"
From The New York Times, in Obama’s Secret to Surviving the White House Years: Books via Wikipedia
Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, chief book critic, January 16, 2017
And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.
What are some of those books?
It’s interesting, the stuff I read just to escape ends up being a mix of things - some science fiction. For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-Body Problem” series -
Oh, Liu Cixin, who won the Hugo Award.
- which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting. It wasn’t so much sort of character studies as it was just this sweeping -
It’s really about the fate of the universe.
Exactly. The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty - not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade. [Laughter]
Beginning of the article based on the interview
Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped - in his life, convictions and outlook on the world - by reading and writing as Barack Obama.
Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life - from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.
During his eight years in the White House - in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions - books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
Click headline for story.
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comments there so far.
Transcript: President Obama on What Books Mean to Him
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, chief book critic, January 16, 2017
And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my own head. [Laughter] Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.
What are some of those books?
It’s interesting, the stuff I read just to escape ends up being a mix of things - some science fiction. For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the “Three-Body Problem” series -
Oh, Liu Cixin, who won the Hugo Award.
- which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting. It wasn’t so much sort of character studies as it was just this sweeping -
It’s really about the fate of the universe.
Exactly. The scope of it was immense. So that was fun to read, partly because my day-to-day problems with Congress seem fairly petty - not something to worry about. Aliens are about to invade. [Laughter]
Beginning of the article based on the interview
Not since Lincoln has there been a president as fundamentally shaped - in his life, convictions and outlook on the world - by reading and writing as Barack Obama.
Last Friday, seven days before his departure from the White House, Mr. Obama sat down in the Oval Office and talked about the indispensable role that books have played during his presidency and throughout his life - from his peripatetic and sometimes lonely boyhood, when “these worlds that were portable” provided companionship, to his youth when they helped him to figure out who he was, what he thought and what was important.
During his eight years in the White House - in a noisy era of information overload, extreme partisanship and knee-jerk reactions - books were a sustaining source of ideas and inspiration, and gave him a renewed appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the human condition.
“At a time when events move so quickly and so much information is transmitted,” he said, reading gave him the ability to occasionally “slow down and get perspective” and “the ability to get in somebody else’s shoes.” These two things, he added, “have been invaluable to me. Whether they’ve made me a better president I can’t say. But what I can say is that they have allowed me to sort of maintain my balance during the course of eight years, because this is a place that comes at you hard and fast and doesn’t let up.”
Click headline for story.
This entry was originally posted at http://thnidu.dreamwidth.org/1595592.html. You can comment here, or there using OpenID or your Dreamwidth ID.
comments there so far.