Zosoforum

I'll start off with 8 business history books I recommend,

Samsung Rising by Geoffrey Cain, as it's interesting East Asian business subject matter.

Becoming Trader Joe by Joe Coulombe, a funny autobiography and a good explanation of the retail business,

Skunk Works by Ben R. Rich, which is far more unique than it should be as a true "hard-tech" post-war engineering narrative that isn't just "the elon story" for the fifth time.

Civilian Warriors by Eric Prince, due to being an interesting Apologia about a unique company.

The Cartiers by Francesca Cartier Brickell, which is a mix of early 20th century story, book on a luxury company and enjoyable family memoir.

The Lego Story by Jens Anderson, a comfortable read on a European company story.

Slaying the Dragon by Ben Riggs, due to the author's thorough research on the accounting of the company in question combined with interesting topic.

DisneyWar by James B. Stewart, which is to being an excellent and long piece of reporting.

Some of my favourite fiction:

Salman Rushdie — Midnight's Children
Don DeLillo — White Noise
Chinua Achebe — Things Fall Apart
Ruth Ozeki — A Tale for the Time Being
Stephen King — The Stand

I'll just copy in what I've read over the last year. I think they're all at least decent.

Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People
Hugh Blaire's Lectures on Rhetoric
David Fischers' Historians' Fallacies
Morris Cohen's Introduction to Logic & Scientific Method

Fernand Braudel's Structures of Everyday Life series
Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean series
(highly recommend Braudel)

Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero Worship
William Simpson's Which Way Western Man
William Gibson's Neuromancer
Phillip Ariés' The Hour of Our Death
John Cuddihy's Ordeal of Civility
Van den Berghe's The Ethnic Phenomenon
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind
Kevin Macdonald's Culture of Critique series
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's The Mind of the Master Class
Alexander Pope's Iliad
Andrew Lang's Iliad
Andrew Land's Odyssey
H.B. Cotterhill's Ancient Greece
Eric Flint's 1634: The Galileo Affair
Alxeandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo
Joseph Heinrich's The WEIRDest People in the World
Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo
Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals
Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Arthur Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism
Eric L. Haley's Inside Delta Force
Kyle Onstott's Breeding Better Dogs
Carl Jung's The Portable Jung
Shelby Stanton's Green Berets ar War
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Some of my favorite books (mostly historical fiction).

Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert
The Pilgrim Kamanita by Karl Gjellerup
Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz
The Last Temptation by Nikos Kazantzakis
Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen

Some recommendations of my own

- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
- The Comedians by Graham Greene
- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- The Hobbit by Tolkien
- X-Wing: Wraith Squadron (the fifth in a series of Star Wars novels from the nineties, it's relatively standalone compared to those preceding or succeeding it, and is the best of its series)
- Darth Plagueis, Tarkin, Labyrinth of Evil, and Catalyst, all by James Luceno (all also Star Wars novels, each standalone and two in the earlier continuity, but there's common subjects and themes in them all)

I strongly recommend everyone interested in post-war American crime, policing and politics read James Ellroy novels.
The L.A. Quartet, about various mostly bent cops involved in schemes and intrigue in late 40s/early 50s Los Angeles, is a good starting point and should be read in order:
The Black Dahlia (has a bad movie adaptation)
The Big Nowhere
L.A. Confidental (good movie, bad adaptation)
White Jazz
The magnum opus however is the Underworld U.S.A. trilogy, about various police adjacent characters involved in basically every criminal and political event from 1958 to 1973. It's a very Homeric sort of series about amoral heroes getting into every conflict shaping modern America. In order:
American Tabloid
The Cold Six Thousand
Blood's A Rover

In terms of fantasy fiction I quite like anything by Ursula K. Le Guin. I just started on the Earthsea series and I enjoy it deeply. Inherent Vice by Pynchon is very good, and I would consider it a prime example of contemporary American literature. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut are good companion novels in that they are about World War Two on the surface, and are incredibly funny satirical critiques of American militarism. To my knowledge both were written during the Vietnam war.

I have read less history, but I'm currently reading The Black Jacobins by CLR James and find it incredibly informative. It deals with the Haitian Revolution and its intimate relationship with the revolution in France. Though it's a nonfictional work, you can tell that CLR James has a great appreciation for literature as he portrays Toussant L'Ouverture as a tragic hero. Interestingly, James seems unaware that L'Ouverture owned slaves himself, prior to leading the slave revolt that would define Haiti as a new nation.

Shanzhai, Deconstruction in Chinese by Han Byung-chul

Arabia and the Arabs by Robert G. Hoyland

Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom

Debt by David Graeber

Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom

رسائل اخوان الصفاء و خلان الوفاء

The Seals of Wisdom by Ibn Arabi

Principles of Mathematics by Bertrand Russell

Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen

As for fiction:
Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
Legend of the Galactic Heroes series by Yoshiki Tanaka
The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster
Nadja by André Breton
Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan
Welcome to the NHK! By Tatsuhiko Takimoto
Children of the Rune by Jeon Min-hee