Books Everyone Should Read

I was just thinking of some of the books I've read recently, and how nicely they dovetail with some things I've read in the past. Rather than keep my thematic reading list to myself, I decided to post it.

The following books aren't the greatest I've read, in absolute terms, but are those that I think have the most to say about our place in the world, as humans, and where we might go from here. Each has influenced my own thinking.

The order below is not the order of these books' greatness; it is the order in which I think you should consider reading them, if you have not read them already.

1. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. I started reading Michael Pollan's books recently after hearing several radio interviews with him. I've written about them before. He's one of those people who can talk to you about something mundane but make you see it in a new and fascinating way. In this book, he makes the case for a healthier, more humane, more sustainable, and ultimately more authentic way of producing and eating our food. But this isn't a book about food so much as about ecology and our place in the natural world.
2. Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism bridges the gap between environmental protection and the free market, making the case -- through a series of real-world case studies -- that these two things aren't just compatible; they are inseparable.
3. "Paradises Lost" by Ursula Le Guin. I'm cheating a bit by including this short story on the list, because above I promised to give you a list of books, so I almost didn't include it. (This story is in the book The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories; the other stories are good, in true Le Guin style, but otherwise unremarkable.) The characters in this short drama are passengers on a generation ship, a spaceship that will require multiple human generations to reach its destination. We will return to the issue of space travel later in this list, but this story makes the cut for a different reason, because of the way it imagines the relationship between the passengers and their environment.
   
4. Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter. This is the second of only two works of fiction in this list -- apologies to my fictophile friends. It makes a couple of interesting though experiments: (1) what does it mean to live in a closed economy (although I disagree that this will be the case in the future; see Natural Capitalism above), and (2) what would it take to overcome that limitation?
   
5. The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner. Manifold: Time makes the case, in a fictional context, for the exploitation of natural resources, and the expansion of humanity, beyond our own planet. The authors of this book do the same but in the context of real-world experience in the aerospace industry.
   
6. The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower. This pseudo-biography tells the stories of physicist Freeman Dyson and of his son, George Dyson, contrasting their very different visions of human purpose and human happiness. George Dyson, who spent his early adult years living alone in a tree and building canoes, brings us back, full circle, to item (1).
   

What's on your list?