Grapes of Wrath is a good one that’s relevant now as when it was made.

Capital and ideology by Thomas Piketty. An eye opener on wealth distribution throughout history and the arguments that held societies together to allow wealth disparity.

Flowers for Algernon

Paris in the Terror by Loomis

Describing public events and the private machinations behind them (through the participant’s journals and letters), revealing how the road to hell is paved with the best of intentions.

The Master and Margarita

Probably won’t get as much out of it as someone who lives in the Soviet union, but it’s an interesting dissection of the absurdity of authority.

My summer reading list (not that I get to read both every year):

• The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke
• The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco

The first is about what we never prepared for, but could try to thrive through. (Mike Oldfield made a cool concept album about this. One of the songs is called “Only time will tell”)

The second is a murder mystery set in a medieval monastery. But wait! Is it actually a multilayered examination of our notions about information? Oh hell yeah.

Brothers Karamazov

Doctor Zhivago

To Kill A Mockingbird

Narnia series

Sundown Towns

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Just the intermissions would get everyone’s blood boiling.

Reading isn’t about any single book. Each book is a peice in a larger concept of expanding ones mind outside the small part of the world they live in. Some expand more than others. But one alone makes only a small difference.

Illusions by Richard Bach, subtitled The Tale of the Reluctant Messiah. A beautiful book about the universe and spirituality. The author wrote it on the premise of “what if I had my own, personal, Jesus… Or Buddha or Messiah that was hanging out with me and explaining the universe”. So this guy is a Messiah that one day just quits to fly airplanes.

It’s funny, it’s inspiring, it’s a little sad, but hopeful. It’s also very short, you can easily read it in an afternoon.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels. Short, yet clearly elaborates on the shift from earlier utopian views of socialism of figures like Robert Owen to the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels.

Honorable mentions go to Capital, Volume I by Karl Marx, Imperialism, the Current Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin, The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, and Neocolonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah. This series of books expands on capitalism during its beginning, intermediate, and imperialist phases, and imperialism itself in its beginning, intermediate, and final phases as they relate to colonialism and neocolonialism.

Surface Detail by Iain M Banks

Part of The Culture series but can be read standalone, potential for being one of the best hard scifi books out there

The awakening of intelligence by Jiddu Krishnamurti

Feels pretty cliche to say them, but

1984, the handmaid’s tale and brave new world

Should probably be on anyone’s list that hasn’t managed to get to them yet

A lot of fiction here so I’ll go the other way and suggest “Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich–and Cheat Everybody Else” by David Cay Johnston.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291700/perfectly-legal-by-david-cay-johnston/

If people aren’t outraged, they aren’t paying attention.

Sample:

"Once, Blattmachr devised a way that Bill Gates, the richest man in America, could reap $200 million in profits on Microsoft stock without paying the $56 million of capital gains taxes that federal law required at the time. The plan was so lucrative that Gates would not have to pay a single dollar in tax and would even be entitled to an income tax deduction of $6 million or so. And that was just the initial plan. The concept could be applied endlessly, allowing Gates to convert billions of dollars in Microsoft stock gains into cash over the years. So long as the Internal Revenue Service did not challenge the deals, then Gates could realize unlimited capital gains without the pain of taxes.

The trick was in manipulating charitable trusts, a common enough device used by generous people who own an asset, such as stock or a building that has appreciated in value. Instead of selling the asset and investing the after-tax proceeds, an individual or a married couple can donate the asset to a charitable trust that they control. The trust sells the asset tax-free and invests the proceeds, giving the donating individual or couple a lifetime income, typically 6 percent per year. When the donors die, what remains in the trust, typically half its value, goes to charity.

Blattmachr’s plan was to take back not 6 percent annually for life, but 80 percent per year for two years. Gates could have pocketed at least $192 million without paying any tax. Then the trust would fold and a charity would get the remaining sum, less than $8 million. Under the plan Gates could have converted into cash more than 96 percent of gains on the Microsoft shares he donated, not the 72 percent he was entitled to after federal capital gains taxes. The charity would get less than four cents on each donated dollar. The government would collect nothing.

The scheme even created a tax deduction that was enough to reduce Gates’s income taxes by about $2 million.

Whether Gates took advantage of such a plan is not known for sure because the law makes individual income tax records confidential. What is known is that when Blattmachr made this route available to others, it sold like a treasure map where X marks the tax-free spot. Billions of dollars of assets poured into these short-term charitable trusts and their super-rich owners took many millions of dollars of income tax deductions that further cut into the flow of revenue to the government.

The technique was so outlandish that when some other tax lawyers got their hands on the map in March 1994, they sent it to the Department of the Treasury in a plain brown envelope. That July, Treasury blocked the route to newcomers and said that it would pursue those who used the device. However, the Internal Revenue Service never announced whether it collected any of the taxes. One hint that the IRS may not have acted against those who used the technique can be found in the records of United States Tax Court, which is where taxpayers challenge the IRS. There are no Tax Court cases in which taxpayers fought for a court blessing on the device, known in taxspeak as an “accelerated charitable remainder trust.”

The Treasury rules shutting down this route to tax-free investment profits were not the end of stretching charitable trusts in ways never anticipated by Congress. So facile is Blattmachr’s mind that from those 1994 rules he divined a new route to tax-free gains. He started selling a new treasure map and billions of dollars more in capital gains passed untaxed into the bank accounts of his clients before the government blocked that second path, known in taxspeak as “son of accelerated charitable remainder trust.”