Often I am asked for recommendations on books to read, and usually, I tailor them to the person asking. But there are some books I recommend repeatedly, so here we are: about to talk about reading some non-fiction books.

My first suggestion with non-fiction is to leave self-help books behind. They prey on our desire to feel productive but achieve little more than being entertaining. They leave the reader feeling good about themselves for completing the book and excited to improve their lives—but usually, that’s where “progress” stops. The books I recommend here won’t make you feel good about yourself. They’ll make you think.

Second, rereading is a normal part of learning. If you find yourself rereading sentences, paragraphs, pages, or entire chapters, that’s not a failure—it’s engagement. The books on this list are dense because they respect the reader enough to say something substantive. Give yourself permission to slow down. It’s about learning against the grain of a culture that rewards box-ticking over understanding.

Finally, it’s up to the reader to meet the book where it is. A book’s quality has nothing to do with whether it can suck you in like a TikTok compilation. Books written primarily to entertain tend to be more fluff than substance—they take you on an emotional journey rather than teaching you something, and more often than not, they could have gotten their point across with 20% of the words. The books below don’t do that. They ask something of you.

The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

By Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

The Dictator’s Handbook is an excellent introduction to thinking about politics and politicians beyond the black-and-white framing of good and evil. These are essential insights because the media sensationalises politics to distract us from the consequences of political decisions, using our tendency to think individually to convince us who is right and wrong for their own benefit. If you’ve ever felt the need to reframe political discourse away from spectacle and towards substance, this book gives you a framework for doing so.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita also wrote the more general Prediction: How to See and Shape the Future with Game Theory, which is also an excellent read. But I’m recommending The Dictator’s Handbook for its focus on politics, and despite the writing being more engaging than one might expect for such content.

Debt: The First 5000 Years

By David Graeber

David Graeber is more well-known for Bullshit Jobs, which is definitely worth a read—particularly if you’ve ever felt that on Mondays, we wear disappointment. But if we want to question what we already know, look no further than Debt: The First 5000 Years. Graeber dismantles the conventional mythology around money and exchange, revealing how debt relations have shaped human societies far more deeply than any economics textbook would have you believe. His work also illuminates how community itself becomes a product under market logic—something Debt traces back millennia.

Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

By Michael Parenti

Did I mention that the media sensationalises politics? That’s just getting started. Parenti’s analysis goes further than most in laying bare the structural mechanisms through which media serves ruling-class interests—not through conspiracy, but through the ordinary functioning of capitalist institutions. If you’ve ever wondered who owns the news when the smoke clears, Parenti provides the structural answer.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky is another good book on the topic. However, Inventing Reality is much more explicit and unforgiving in the best way possible. Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism is also essential reading for understanding how liberal democracies have historically related to both fascism and socialism—and for cutting through the anti-leftist tales that pass for political education.

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

By Mark Fisher

I enjoy discussing political economy and how the currently dominant economic system affects us individually. However, it’s not an easy topic to get into. So before we dive into the heavy stuff, I recommend entering the “let’s critically view capitalism” zone with Capitalist Realism. It’s an extremely short book but serves as an excellent contemporary primer on where we’re at and where the problems truly lie. I’ve written more directly about escaping capitalist realism and why a post-capitalist world feels unimaginable—Fisher’s book is where that conversation begins. His analysis also helps explain the growing plague of misanthropy that late capitalism produces as a byproduct of its ideological grip.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

By Vladimir Lenin

Imperialism is Lenin’s concise yet devastating analysis of how capitalism necessarily evolves into imperialism—the division of the world among monopolies and great powers. Written in 1916, it remains startlingly relevant for understanding why wars are fought, why the global south remains exploited, and why reformism within a single nation cannot address the systemic nature of capitalist expansion. It builds naturally on Marx’s Capital and contextualises the political economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the kind of danger on the global scale that only becomes visible when you understand imperialism as a system rather than a series of bad decisions. Lenin’s The State and Revolution is equally essential for understanding the role of the state as an instrument of class rule, and what a transition beyond capitalism actually requires—a question inseparable from understanding how the virus exposed the system.

Capital: A Critique of Political Economy

By Karl Marx

Capital is one of the best examples of a series of incredibly lengthy books where each sentence is exceptionally dense in content, without the fluff seen in many other books. It builds on what Marx discussed in Value, Price and Profit, which itself is part of his work in developing the economic analyses of those such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo a century earlier. I’ve written about the foundations of value, price, and profit and how surplus value tastes like vanilla—those posts are essentially attempts to make Marx’s core insights accessible without losing their precision.

It goes without saying that if you get through volume 1, it’s worth picking up 2 and 3. Of particular note is how Marx addresses the finance sector in the third volume, which tends to be a gotcha for those who argue against his analysis. Understanding socially necessary labour time also reframes questions like why my biography is not a business expense—it cuts through the mythology of individual worth that capitalism uses to justify inequality.

Towards a New Socialism & How the World Works

By Paul Cockshott

Towards a New Socialism and How the World Works: The Story of Human Labor from Prehistory to the Modern Day are where political economy meets computation. Cockshott brings a relatively unique programmer-based perspective to the question of what a planned economy could actually look like with modern technology—not as utopian speculation, but as an engineering problem with tractable solutions. He also has a YouTube channel where he explores these ideas further. If Marx provides the diagnosis and Lenin the political strategy, Cockshott offers something rarer: a concrete proposal for what comes next.

Please, sir, I want some more

The Lie Behind the Lie Detector by George W. Maschke and Gino J. Scalabrini is thought-provoking whether or not you’ve put much thought into whether lie detectors actually achieve what they’re supposed to.

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson is an entertaining look into the absurdity of some of the more family-friendly experiments by the US Army. His other books vibe similarly, such as The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry.

American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News―From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror by Roberto Sirvent and Danny Haiphong is arguably necessary reading, even if it doesn’t go as far as it easily could. The paper Unmaking an exception: A critical genealogy of US exceptionalism by David Hughes is worth tracking down for more on this topic.

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Frederick Engels is as the title describes: a concise walk through history providing necessary context for understanding modern political economy.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Frederick Engels is a short and accessible entry point into understanding the distinction between wishful thinking about a better world and the scientific analysis of how to actually build one—the sanitised revolution we’re often sold versus the real thing.

Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism by Kwame Nkrumah extends Lenin’s analysis of imperialism into the post-colonial era, demonstrating how formal independence did not end exploitation but merely changed its form. Essential for understanding the contemporary global order.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney is a rigorous historical materialist account of how European capitalism systematically extracted wealth from Africa while arresting its development—a corrective to any narrative that frames African poverty as natural or inevitable.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire examines education as either an instrument of domination or of liberation. Freire’s framework for critical consciousness remains indispensable for anyone thinking seriously about how ideology reproduces itself—about the privilege of ignorance and who benefits from it remaining unexamined.

Red Star Over the Third World by Vijay Prashad offers a compact overview of how the Russian Revolution inspired anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America—a useful reminder that socialism has never been a purely European affair.

And there we have it: an incomplete list of some books I recommend reading.