Having children - ours are now 4 and 7 - makes reading harder. I’m picturing a beach on a warm island, a gripping work of narrative nonfiction, with a mezcalita and my wife, Priya Parker, at my side. My ideal reading experience was before having children. Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how). Steinbeck’s lyrical explanation of the way a brutal new capitalism was unfolding makes me think that we need but don’t yet have enough such literature for the new capitalist frontier of our own time: the platforms and algorithms of Big Tech. Reading “The Grapes of Wrath” offers such a powerful reminder of the way that literature can unabashedly engage in politics at no cost to either pursuit. In the pile now are Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction, James Baldwin’s “Another Country,” Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time,” “Inside U.S.A.” by John Gunther, and - my current focus - John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” which I should have read before but I hadn’t, probably because it was assigned. Books don’t fit on or in them, however, so I keep a towering pile on the floor, which, between us, is straining my marriage. Some time ago, I bought a pair of red, can-shaped Italian night stands with tiny curved drawers.
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