The ones that influenced me the most earlier in life was

• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
• sapiens, by yuval noah harari

Both illuminate what it means to be human and what makes us (not) achieve happiness, but explained through very different lenses

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

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.”

Different people like different books.

• The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Perhaps you could dismiss it as having too much of a Western focus, but it really was an eye opening book that made me reexamine various cultural institutions at the time I read it

The Art of UNIX Programming by Eric. S Raymond. I’m only half-joking; I used to read it when I had insomnia because it was equal parts fascinating but verbose enough to get me to sleep.

Otherwise Waking Up by Sam Harris. I’d only heard of him after a group meditation sessions which I’d never done before and immediately became hooked: that you could be spiritual without religion was an entirely new concept for me.

Project hail Mary ,better than movie.

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

Demon Haunted World -Carl Sagan

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

The Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

All of Discworld.

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

Atlas Shrugged

(Haha just kidding!)

Dune.