What books would you recommend to somebody who wants to know more about Nebraska?

A compilation of the Associated Press college football polls from 1970 through 2001. Willa Cather’s “O, Pioneers!” is also pretty decent (although “Death Comes for the Archbishop” is my favorite Cather work).

Your children are home-schooled. What books do you have them read?

Melissa (my wife) and I think it’s important to distinguish between habits and content. Perhaps most importantly, we want them to be addicted to reading. To that end, we’ve been trying to build into them a desire to join “the Century Club,” which requires reading 100 books in 365 days. None of them have succeeded yet, but one of our teenagers might this coming year. To ensure that they don’t prioritize easy-quantity over quality, Melissa and I take an active role in the selection of every other book.

I just checked in on our teenage daughters and one of them was reading “Dracula”; the other is reading “Great Expectations.”

Are there books you feel all American children should read?

I devoted a chapter of “The Vanishing American Adult” to trying to build a “five-foot bookshelf” — of 60 books — that we would regard as a kind of evolving “family canon.” I wrestled there with how I think the canon fights often devolve into an endless argument about what book or identity group is being excluded at the arbitrary line between book 60 and 61, or between book 200 and 201. So I want to be clear that I don’t think our “family canon” is the only canon for every American family, but I do strongly believe that every American family should be developing their own canon of books they read together and repeatedly — and moreover that we should be comparing our lists with those of our neighbors and fellow citizens, so that we might enrich one another.

As we considered a thousand-plus candidate books for our canon, we ultimately decided to segment that work by limiting ourselves to 12 categories with a maximum of five books each. Our categories include big themes like: God, Greek Roots, Shakespeare, the American Idea, Markets, American Fiction, a Humanistic Perspective on Science, etc. Our category on Tyrants and Totalitarianism, for example, includes Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and “The Communist Manifesto,” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?

I’ve been aching over Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” for two years straight. It was widely praised, but still not enough. We ought to be talking constantly about the troubling data Professor Putnam has uncovered. There really are “two different Americas,” but not in the way the phrase lingers in our ears because of how John Edwards’s presidential campaign in 2004 branded the 1 percent and the 99 percent. Putnam shows that the troubling resurgence of socioeconomic class in America centers primarily around the divide between the mobile educated elite (31 percent of our neighbors, according to Putnam) and the majority of America — the 69 percent of kids he says are born into a house with no college graduates. These children have collapsing family structures, decreasing socioeconomic mobility and rapidly thinning networks of kith and kin. I like J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” but Putnam’s work is, I think, the big backdrop for understanding the vicious cycle of how declining economic opportunities for the non-educationally credentialed and family and neighborhood collapse are becoming mutually reinforcing for broad swaths of America.

A close second: Nicholas Eberstadt’s “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.”

Which fiction or nonfiction writers inspired you most early your career?