Hands down for me: Atlas Shrugged. Period.

Catch-22 and Guns, Germs, and Steel

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Non-fiction..

Rights of Man by Thomas Paine.
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.
War is a Racket by Smedley Butler.

May seem a bit silly but I read Mists of Avalon years ago, and although it is fiction it made me start to realize how competitive religions were in controlling world views. I started to question mine. I grieved when I finished the book.

Fight Club

The God Delusion.
The Age of Reason.
God is not Great .
A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Dune. Confirmed, not developed.

“The Science of Discworld” V1-4 by Sir Terry Pratchett (STP). Covered human history, science, literature, and religion better than any other text I know of. With the possible exception of “Systemantics” by Gall. It explains systems somewhat more succinctly than TSOD, But not by much.

William Horwood's Duncton Wood has a great influence on me as a young person. It is a series of stories about animals in a wood. On another level it is about culture, history, identity and spirit.

All is Quiet on the Western Front , Erich Maria Remarque. I read it as a teenager, had to take it out of the library under the pretense that my father wanted to read it.

Stranger in a Strange Land....Rabbit Run...The Plot Against America.

"The Pearl" by John Steinbeck.

It was assigned reading in high school and it is also the book that first got me interested in reading a lot more books. In Steinbeck's nonfiction book "The Sea of Cortez", he mentions the inspiration for the story was based on a story he heard from local villagers of supposedly actual events. "The Pearl" and "The Grapes of Wrath" both together show harsh relaities and put me in touch with the real world, after having been raised in an insulated religious home which left me very sheltered from reality.

It was not long after that I also read "Animals Farm" an d"1984" by George Orwell, which showed me tht although reality was harsh, things could always be/get much worse.

Those four books flipped me from the conservative mindset i ws brought up to have, to a progressive mindse, seeing fairness and equality for all.

"Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin.

"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" and "Cancer Ward" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The Art of Loving" by Erich Fromm.

"The Pearl" by John Steinbeck.

"Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck.

"Nine Stories" by J.D. Salinger

"The War Prayer" by Mark Twain.

"Side Effects" by Woody Allen.

"Animal Farm" by George Orwell.

My high school calculus book.

Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged."

Was a logic book.

When I was younger it was books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women and the classics. Then in middle school I read The Third Reich and The Diary of Anne Frank. Lately it's been books by Wamariya (The Girl With The Glass Bead Smile), Jasmyn Ward (Sing Unburied Sing), Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami. I particularly like non-American authors for their perspective on the world outside of our myopic view.

"Innocents Abroad" by Mark Twain

Cutting it down to 3 is still substantial.

Freakonomics by Steven Levitt
Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins
The Creature from Jeckyl Island by G. Edward Griffin

God: A Human History by Reza Aslan

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the America City by Desmond Matthew

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters by Atul Gawande

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America All by Barbara Ehrenreich

We Are Our Brains from the Womb to Alzheimers by Dick Swaab

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in The Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander.

1. The Age Of Reason, by Thomas Paine
2. Biography of Thomas Jefferson

God is Not Great.

The satanic bible by anton lavey or the god delusion by Richard Dawkins

I Ching Wilhelm/Baynes version