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.
The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
All of Discworld.
All of Discworld.
That’d be a pretty big book…
A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.
There is so, so much that Americans don’t know that they don’t know.
Reading that right now. Definitely changing my perspective that America was once a good place.
Follow it up with Settlers, a history of settler-colonialism and the slave trade in the US. No matter how much you think you know about the history of indigenous genocide and chattel slavery in the US, reality is likely far worse than you think.
I’m curious; Would you mind to give some highlights?
Got some random highlights? I’m curious how many I’ve seen mentioned on Lemmy.
The first that I usually mention is the Coal Wars / Battle of Blair Mountain or the Sand Creek Massacre, but there are many events that American students are made to be ignorant if on purpose.
It also got me to learn that after meeting the natives for the first time, Columbus literally wrote in his diary about how easy it would be to steal from them because they were so peaceful.
A pixie book or equivalent. Pixie books are short children’s books (maybe 12 DinA6 pages with very little text and lots of pictures). They are dirt cheap and there is a big bowl full of them in many books stores in Germany. They are meant to get kids into reading and that’s why I ‘nominated’ them here xD
Excluding religious text~
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
Any book written by Cormac McCarthy
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Short stories by Kurt Vonnegut
Do Androinds Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick
Definitely lots more
Instead of Sapiens I’d suggest The Dawn of Everything.
1984
Was going to say this, many people cite it but never read. It is readable well, do it.
Also, I think Fahrenheit 451 translates far better to our situation, as I see media and social media in there long before it was even thinkable.
1984/farenheit 451/Brave New World are the adolescent trilogy for me that anyone who wants to understand the nature of people and mechanics of power would do well to read.
I’d add Animal Farm to that as well.
It’s good to add the other two too but I never could read brave new world, I struggled page by page and gave up. Can not name a specific reason other than I could not get into it.
From a story perspective it should be perfect for me.
Aldos Huxley is not a great writer. I think he had a better understanding of humanity than Orwell… Or at least, I feel like his books are more insightful, but he is not as good of a writer.