On Friday, January 13, The New York Times’s chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, interviewed Barack Obama about the influence literature has had on his presidency.

“I think that I found myself better able to imagine what’s going on in the lives of people throughout my presidency because of not just a specific novel but the act of reading fiction,” Obama said. “It exercises those muscles, and I think that has been helpful. And then there’s been the occasion where I just want to get out of my head. Sometimes you read fiction just because you want to be someplace else.”

Obama enumerated books that he said fell into the latter category: “a mix of things—some science fiction. For a while, there was a three-volume science-fiction novel, the ‘Three-Body Problem’ series, which was just wildly imaginative, really interesting.... The scope of it was immense.”

For a “sense of solidarity,” he read writings by Gandhi, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and others. “[D]uring very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating,” he explained. “So sometimes you have to sort of hop across history to find folks who have been similarly feeling isolated, and that’s been useful.”

Read the full transcript at the Times.

Related reading: Thousands of writers assembled at the New York Public Library and then marched to Trump Tower over the weekend for the #WritersResist protest, Publishers Weekly reports.

Photo Credit: Damon Winter/The New York Times.