🇺🇸 Reading America250: A Year-Long Journey Through Four Books 🇺🇸

Introducing the American250 Book Club: Starting with Giant by Edna Ferber

2026 marks America’s 250th birthday—our semiquincentennial.

If you listen to Pantsuit Politics, you know I am very into this milestone and believe it is a productive political act to understand our history and celebrate our ideals. Now, what is one of the best ways to do this? How do we reckon with all that history—the triumphs and the tragedies, the promises kept and broken, the myths we tell ourselves and the realities we live?

We READ!

Introducing the American250 Book Club: Four books across 2026, each illuminating a different facet of who we are and how we got here.

---

The Reading List

Q1 (January-March): Giant by Edna Ferber
Texas. Oil wealth. Mexican Americans. White supremacy. The contradictions at the heart of the American dream.

Q2 (April-June): Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
Turn-of-the-century New York. Immigration. Industrialization. Historical figures colliding with fictional lives.

Q3 (July-September): Roots by Alex Haley
From Africa to America. Seven generations. The legacy of slavery and the meaning of identity.

Q4 (October-December): The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Chinese American mothers and daughters. Immigration. Assimilation. What gets lost and what survives across generations.

Together, these four books span 300 years of American experience. They are all multi-generational family dramas - my absolute favorite genre. What better way to understand America then through the story of American families!?

First Up: Giant by Edna Ferber

Published in 1952, Giant tells the story of Leslie Lynnton, a Virginia socialite who marries Texas cattle rancher Jordan “Bick” Benedict and moves to his vast ranch, Reata.

What unfolds is an epic spanning decades: the transformation of Texas from cattle country to oil empire, the treatment of Mexican American workers, the stubborn grip of white supremacy, the collision between old money and new, and one woman’s awakening to the moral rot beneath the gleaming surface of Texas prosperity.\

Y’all, this book struck a nerve when it came out. It was banned in some Texas cities. Ferber had dared to write about the racism toward Mexican Americans that polite Texas society preferred to ignore. Even still, it was a smashing success and led to a classic 1956 film starring James Dean in his final role.

Reading Giant in 2026 is… uncomfortable. The racism is explicit. The economic exploitation is brutal. The refusal of wealthy white Texans to acknowledge their complicity is maddening.

And yet: This is America. Not a version of America. Not a caricature. This is the country—its bigness, its brutality, its capacity for both transformation and entrenchment.

---

How This Works

Reading schedule:
Giant is about 447 pages. Read it at your own pace between now and the end of March. I’ll post a mid-month check-in in February and we will have a full discussion at the end of March for paid subscribers.

---

Why I’m Doing This

I’m doing this because I want to celebrate America but without ignoring her complexities and contradictions. I want to understand her better. Novels won’t give me easy answers, but I’m hoping they’ll allow me to experience a little of all this complicated history.

And at 250 years old, maybe that’s what America needs most: people willing to sit with difficult questions and resist easy answers.

So. Who’s joining me?

Grab a copy of Giant (any edition works—I’m reading the Harper Perennial paperback), and let’s read America together.

Drop a comment if you’re in. Tell me: What do you hope to learn about America in its 250th year?