Herman Melville. If only he had known that one day he would become Barack Obama's favourite author!

Barack Obama   Book Blog

We congratulate President-elect Barack Obama on his historic victory. We wish him the very best as he grapples with a legacy of problems both at home and abroad - and allows America back into the world-fold, or as recent Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga of The White Tiger fame put it in a recent Times article ...'fundamentally, I think, most of us are sick of hating America, and would like things to go back to the way they were eight years ago - when we made regular mocking comments about American stupidity, while the roladex kept the address of a brother or sister living in New Jersey with a green card, just in case'.

When we discovered, through a piece in the Daily Telegraph, that Obama collects   Spider-Man and   Conan the Barbarian   comics, has read all the Harry Potter books, and lists his favourite book as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, we thought he deserved a blog page! We then find out from the Guardian that Obama says the novels of Philip Roth "helped shape my sensibility" while futher edvidence from his Facebook page and a recent essay in the New York Times add 'Emerson, Nietzsche, Niebhur and Tillich for philosophy and theology; Jefferson, Lincoln, Gandhi, Adam Smith, WEB Du Bois, Martin Luther King and James Baldwin for politics and economics; and other non-fiction books by David Halberstam and Studs Terkel'.

'In fiction,' as the Guardian goes on to tell us, that (as well as Melville's Moby Dick) 'Obama has picked out Shakespeare's tragedies' ... 'Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and Robert Penn Warren's All the king's Men'.

He can write well too - 'moving and genuinely about himself' - as the New York Times admitted in a 2006 review of Obama's Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir written before he entered politics, and about his attempts to come to terms with his absent father. He can write about Brits too, when remembering on a trip to Kenya - 'After talking to a young British student on an aircraft, who spoke of these "poor buggers" in "these Godforsaken countries": 'Beside me the young Brit was snoring softly now, his glasses askew on his fin-shaped nose ... Maybe I was just angry because of his easy familiarity with me, his assumption that I, as an American, even a Black American, might naturally share his dim view of Africa.'

Obama's more recent The Audacity of Hope is considered much more political. And of course both titles can be accessed through Amazon below - for those who want to know more about what makes the man tick and where we might expect American politics to go from here. They have, of couse, shot up the bestseller lists in the US and UK in the last few days!

The UK sales have also been great news for Edinburgh based publishers Canongate - whose antenna when it comes to sniffing-out edgy writing from promising authors - including 2002 Booker Prize Winner Yann  Mantel's The Life of Pi - is well known. Canongate's Managing Director Jamie Byng discovered Obama's works some two years ago, before the Democrat Party's presidential nominee skyrocketed to fame - and is now reaping the reward with a potential run of up to 500,000 copies by year end - thanks to (dare we use that word again - yes let's!) skyrocketing orders from booksellers too!