Alec Ross: If You Don’t Read, You Cannot Be Wise.

I tend to go into a 2 minute explanation about being an author, an advisor to start-ups, leading a policy team for a presidential campaign and one or two other things.

I’m reading the recently published novel Bright, Precious Days by Jay McInerney and Boozehound by Jason Wilson, which is raising my IQ about spirits.

The Wrecking Yard by Pinckney Benedict. It’s a compilation of short stories by a West Virginian author that animates the very distinct piece of Appalachia where I grew up.

President of the United States.

I think he’d be impressed by how much of the world I’ve traveled but less impressed by the degree to which I’ve shaped that world. My school-aged self had immodest ambitions.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I know that might seem ridiculous, but the lessons from that book about ambition, artifice, love and not-love would serve any young person leaving education well. Better that than a business book.

I tend to read on planes and trains. That might seem limiting, but if you knew how much I traveled you would not think so. In the last six years I have probably traveled two million miles to fifty countries. During the four years I was in government, any day that I was not on a plane meant that I was on an hour-long train ride at the beginning and end of the day.

When I was quite young, I read from what I suppose you could call the “liberal’s cannon for literature”. This included The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. These books set me on the path I am still on today working for social and economic justice. There was not one book that created an intellectual and emotional tipping point, it was all of them. Then toward the end of college and at the beginning of my career when I was a 6th grade teacher in a very poor, very violent part of Baltimore I read its modern, urban antecedents, works like The Other Side of the River by Alex Kotlowitz, A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, Makes Me Wanna Holler by Nathan McCall, Push by Sapphire and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon and Ed Burns. These books drove decades worth of focus on fighting urban poverty and injustice.

When I was 12 years old, I lived in Italy with my grandparents in Rome for a year. Rome is one of those places where the past feels present. The fictionalized accounts of ancient empires by Mary Renault, and I, Claudius and Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina by Robert Graves bring my late grandfather back to life in my mind.

The book I’ve recommended most is Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland.

I read more non-fiction but I learn more from fiction. I suppose I prefer great fiction to great non-fiction and I prefer good or mediocre non-fiction to good or mediocre fiction.

Oh my goodness, yes! People who don’t read are missing something important, something essential. I don’t care how intelligent you are, if you don’t read, you cannot be wise.

Originals by Adam Grant.

Real, dead wood books.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

I know, live and work in the realm where the exercise of geopolitical power takes place. Three books that taught me a great deal about power are: All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe and The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas.

I don’t know if any of them qualify as great literature, but some novels that affected me when I read them over the past several decades include The Short Novels of John Steinbeck which includes Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy by John Updike, Brightness Falls by Jay McInerney, The Privileges by Jonathan Dee and Rick Bass’ short stories.

I really, really hope that I invert the ratio of recent years’ reading which has been 80/20 nonfiction/fiction. Nothing would make me happier than to be able to intellectually detach from present circumstances and read less business and political books, and more fiction.

Incomplete.