Barack Obama is reading gritty rural neo-noir by an acknowledged master of the crime fiction genre, and the National Review is not happy with him. The president bought Daniel Woodrell's "Bayou Trilogy," along with a number of other novels, at a Martha's Vineyard bookstore, and Tevi Troy, a "senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former senior White House aide" ("senior fellow at the Hudson Institute" means "minor Republican apparatchik in need of a paycheck while his party's out of power") is analyzing the president's reading list for you.

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The reports are in about the books President Obama is looking at on his annual trip to Martha’s Vineyard. According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante.

The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

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