Netherland has been given the presidential seal of approval, after Barack Obama admitted in an interview with the New York Times magazine that he had become "sick enough of briefing books" to begin reading a novel in the evening, and had plumped for Joseph O'Neill's story of cricket in post-9/11 New York.

Just being handed a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez made the 1973 work into an unlikely bestseller, so who knows what effect actually reading Netherland will have on the book's sales? Its publisher is certainly expecting a spike and has already gone back to press in anticipation.

I think Netherland is a wonderful novel – it even got a cricket-loather like me interested in the game – and it's got to be more tempting to the masses keen to emulate Obama's every literary move than a tract about the exploitation of Latin America (already snapped up by Serpent's Tail at the London Book Fair). I admit to being slightly bemused at the effect Obama has, without even trying, on literary habits (it wouldn't happen to Gordon Brown), but he has got great taste: his Facebook page also lists Marilynne Robinson's Gilead as one of his favourite books. Robert McCrum has already asked what you'd recommend to Obama's staff, but what novels would you put on the president's bedside table?