Ask Lemmy

The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All of Discworld.

1984

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.

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

Dune.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

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.

1984, so that people mentioning it online will stop sounding like complete fucking idiots.

Or perhaps The Jungle; it sparked public outcry and major overhauls the last time it became popular, maybe it can work its magic again.

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

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Hah. I'd be happy to hear that everyone read at least one book in their lifetime.

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.”

Atlas Shrugged

(Haha just kidding!)

Demon Haunted World -Carl Sagan

Stranger in a Strange Land

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Same message, two vastly different methods of communicating it

The bible.

Sodom and Gomorrah and the story of Jacob are basically an iq test.

Not only do the stories sound highly unreal, even if they are real the only rational conclusion is that god is evil and petty.

That said, the philosophies of Jesus are pretty cool and often still relevant today.

Any one of them.

Please.

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

While I read it in university for a history class… I quite like Candide by Voltaire. Sometimes we all should just tend our own gardens.

Shogūn (really hope I got that phonetic right) by James Clavell. Even, maybe especially if you're not a weeaboo.

The fellowship of the ring, the republic, the history of mathematics, the saga of swamp thing, the invisibles, Macbeth

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

Aldous Huxley's Island. Something to aim for.

Also, it's been a while since I read it, and it's a bit didactic, but Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. It's about a telepathic gorilla, and it had the capacity to blow minds.

Flowers for Algernon

Project hail Mary ,better than movie.

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.

Don Quixote

Oh the places you'll go!
Dr Seuss

Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
Robert M. Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Stephen King - The Stand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

The Master and Margarita

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

The Stranger by Albert Camus. It's very short, barely over 100 pages, and it helped me realize that nothing really matters.

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.