I seem to be reading (or re-reading) mostly non-fiction at the moment.
The current book in progress is a re-read - Seymour Martin Lipset's
Political Man. Lipset was a sociologist, and his work explored the underlying social bases behind various political movements. It makes some points that seem to be forgotten in today's political environment. A minor one is that Left, Right, and Center all derive from the French First Republic, where delegates to the assembly sat in a semi-circle, with the lower classes at the left, the upper classes at the right, and the middle class in the center. A more interesting one is that Fascism (embodied by by Peronism in Argentina, Mussolini in Italy, and De Gaulle in France) is a
middle-class movement. The supporters are farmers, small businessmen, lower level government employees and the like, who see themselves threatened by things like trade unionism on the Left and Big Business on the Right. I see "Fascist" tossed around frequently as an epithet, and all I can say is "I don't think that word means what you think it does."
I was delighted to find Political Man at archive.org. (
https://archive.org/details/politicalmansoci00inlips)
The Mobi version is readable here, but it needs substantial cleanup to be a proper eBook. Among other things, it makes extensive use of footnotes, which the scanning process drops in-line in the page where they appear, and they need to be moved elsewhere and turned into proper hyper-links.
One new read is Joseph Schumpeter's
Captialism, Socialism, and Democracy. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital..._and_Democracy)
Schumpeter was an Austrian economist (and briefly Austria's Minister of Finance), and a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes. He was inspired by Marx, but thought "Marx asked all the right questions, and got all the wrong answers." He was a friendly critic of Keynes, who thought that Keynes got the wrong answers too, but recommended Keynes' work that talked about money.
See
http://www.forbes.com/2007/10/10/sch...chumpeter.html for a good overview on the pair by Peter F. Drucker. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Drucker)
Speaking of Drucker, another re-read is his
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. Drucker is credited with inventing modern management, starting with his 1947 work
The Concept of the Corporation, by analyzing and codifying what management was and what managers did. Drucker's work underlies a good deal of my own thinking, and I consider it crucial.
Other re-reads of critical stuff include Edward T. Hall's (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_T._Hall) books,
The Silent Language, and
The Hidden Dimension. Professor Hall was an anthropologist at the University of New Mexico, doing research on comparative culture. He and his research partner, linguist Norman Trager, discovered they would have to create a comprehensive theory of culture to define and classify what they were comparing. The theory is laid out in those books, and a third volume,
Beyond Culture. Hall's theory treats culture as communication, and makes the critical point that 90% of it is handled on an unconscious reflex level.
Many things fell into place when I first read Hall.
Upcoming in the queue are Thomas Kuhn's
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Jared Mason Diamond's
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, and Julian Jaynes'
The Origin of Conscoiusness in the Breakdown of the Bi-cameral Mind.
So many books. So little time.