Intelligence briefings, classified memos, speech edits—President Obama clearly can’t share the details of his daily Oval Office reading list. But Obama, one of the great orators of modern politics, was influenced by great authors long before he got national security clearance. In our November issue, the president gave WIRED a crash course in the books that shaped him.

Like all diligent overachievers, we take our homework seriously. So we calculated how much time you’d need to read everything on Professor Obama’s syllabus. You’re looking at 89 hours with great minds like Abraham Lincoln, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Kolbert. Obama appreciates an excellent novel like John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, but doesn’t shy away from hard-hitting nonfiction, like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. And he’s got a soft spot for biographies of great American forces of change, from Andy Grove to Martin Luther King Jr.

Of course, you could space that reading out over a manageable amount of time. But you also could work on your taxes for an hour a week and have them done by March. So next time you’ve got a week to spare, kick up your feet and cram for your freshman lit seminar in the Oval Office. There’s never been such a good excuse for avoiding conversation with extended family over the holidays; let the binge-reading begin!