Hi, this is Chris Hubs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about books.

I read a lot.

I always have.

I had my first library card when I was in elementary school.

The library is just a magical place, and I’ve continued to go at it ever since.

If there’s anything I obsess over as much as books, it’s probably logging and organizing the books that I read.

I checked back, and I have tracked, in one form or another, every book I’ve read for the last 20 years, which is a little bit bonkers when I think about it, but such is life.

And you can go to my website, and I have a separate book logging sub-website where I’ve tracked over those years about a little over 1,300 books that I have read, which is plenty.

I also recognize there’s a bunch of books that I read before that that never got logged, and I’m just sort of living with that because, you know, such is life.

The best part maybe about finishing a book sometimes is getting to pick up the next one.

I’m pretty much a completionist.

Very hard for me to put one down without having finished it, which sometimes can lead to just slow progress.

But most of the time means I just get through a lot of stuff.

So the book I finished this weekend, which somehow I’d never read before, was John Steinbeck’s classic, The Grapes of Wrath.

Somehow I’ve never—I mean, I know this one is in the culture.

It’s required reading in a lot of high school classes.

Somehow I never got to it in high school, and somehow never got to it, never watched the movie adaptation, never read the book until this past month.

And oh man, I mean, just to state the obvious, this Steinbeck guy could write.

I’ve read a couple of his things before.

I’ve read East of Eden and loved it, read Cannery Row, loved that one.

But just his ability to turn a phrase, to write a paragraph, fantastic stuff.

The way Grapes of Wrath is structured is alternating chapters between continuing the narrative of the family that he’s following during the Dust Bowl, and then interstitial chapters that are very short that sort of talk about the progress of life in that period in general.

And oh my goodness, those interstitials, one where he describes—it’s short, but he’s talking about the decay of an abandoned house, and it’s just amazing writing.

I can’t recommend enough.

It feels a little bit too timely that in 2026 we’re reading a book that’s almost 100 years old, and still what’s the story about?

About a family of migrants who are in economic turmoil because of large corporations that have more or less taken over their livelihood, who are searching for work, who are— Very, very poor and struggling to make ends meet.

And, oh my goodness, a runoff by everybody who, every place they try to go.

Stunning writing, quite a story.

Just not enough to say about it.

Definitely, definitely worth the read if you haven’t read it yet.

I had to go on from there to something a little more cheerful.

I had a palate cleanser with a book that I wouldn’t recommend, like a sci-fi thriller adventure thing called Bewilderness that was not nearly enough plot for as many pages as it was, but at least it went fast.

So we’ll see.

Right now, my next one I’m going to pick up is a history of some of movie making focused on, it looks like, the younger days and the getting started days of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola.

So just got into that one yesterday.

We’ll see where it goes, but fun, fun with reading.

Enough for today.

We’ll talk again.