Any one of them.
Please.
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.
Few other sci-fi books do as good a job of depicting how a gift/library economy could work like in practice. It’s quite a hopeful vision of where we can collectively go in the future.
It also shows a realistic version of utopian hope. An eternal struggle for better
That reminds me that I really need to put more le guin into my book pile
Don Quixote
It’s old but very readable and surprisingly funny. Even gets quite meta at points!
Goes off on some tangents at points (including some nested stories), but even these I found quite fun.
I haven’t read it but i love this take by late great Michael Sugrue https://youtu.be/zQtP3ZHRA3Q
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. For me, I think Russian literature is a must-read.
The Maxims of Ptahhotep. First book we know of & filled with practical advice.
The section dealing with domestic demons by applying crocodile urine to your underwear is worth living by.
What number maxim is that?
The egg by Andy Weir. It gave me the basis for Gnosticism / the spirituality that I genuinely think is closest to the truth ie: humans do have a soul, but it’s all the same soul / consciousness that just splits up into sperate little chunks of perception for a little bit at a time before rejoining the whole in different places and splitting off again from and to a completely different place. Honestly the main thing I learned from psychology, neurology, and physics classes is that time, or at least the human perception of it, is almost completely bullshit, and that our perception of our brain as a separate thing that controls the rest of our body, or even as our body as a separate thing from the world like a suit in space is a significant cause of mental illness.
Why does our sense of self so often stop at our brain when most of our neurotransmitters are in our gut? How can you be the cells but not the fluid you filter then piss out? Your upper layers of skin and hair are dead how can they be more you than the air trapped between them? There’s a reason drugs dissolving your sense of self, even temporarily, is often described as a positively transformative experience.
A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson
A Brief History of Time
The Count of Monte Christo, Fahrenheit 451, Neuromancer.
Count of Monte Christo imo isn’t so great, or maybe I’ve read too many shorter riffs on the theme. I’d also plop 1984 before 451.
The Count of Monte Christo
i keep seeing this listed, but I saw the Wishbone episode of it when i was younger and i dont think i could take it as seriously and also already knowing the twist at the end
Give it a try. I was blown away by how good it is. I prefer the audiobook because it’s so long.
To kill a mockingbird -Harper Lee
After reading it, I felt I had read and understood something important that remained with me. Not a difficult or long book, enjoyable and interesting.
The Stranger by Albert Camus. It’s very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.
World-2023 ESN Publications and London Organisation of Skills Development Ltd
About 100000 pages. If you read a page per minute, continuously without breaks you’ll lose over 60 days of economic activity to this. This would massively disrupt the world if everyone had to read it.
For Americans I think “slavery by another name” and “bury my heart at wounded knee” should be required reading.
Don’t really know one book that everyone should read, maybe everyone should read more than one book
Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz.
A short read that makes you think about how you interact with the world. I’ve read it multiple times and always take something new from it.
