The former Christian cult transformed to the biggest Commercial Festivity of the World can hardly be ignored. Everywhere over the World jingle bells are sounding. So, why not take part of it and give a gift to someone you like and want the best for. The best gift, in my opinion, is the gift of tools and knowledge. So why not giving a book?

The influences in our lives come from the people we meet, the experiences we have, the kind of media we enjoy and the books we read. Sometimes a single book can put someone on a trajectory that fundamentally rise his/her life forever.

Some great books I recommend as gifts:

The Machine Stops, by E.M. Forster is short novella originally published in 1909. Forster predicted almost everything in our modern society, including pandemics and social distancing, video calls, online delivery... and most of all, reliance on "experts" who control our lives: “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the World there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. The novel from 1931 anticipates developments in reproductive technology, psychological manipulation and conditioning from a government which, different from “1984” not censure, but let all media be free, so it ends up shadowing important information behind an enormous quantity of useless information.

Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, is a fictional, philosophical tale about a two-dimensional world populated by beings shaped as triangles, squares and circles who suddenly become aware that there's a third dimension. As they only know how to move in a plane, the third dimension becomes a kind of abstract.

Industrial Society and it´s future, 1992 by Ted Kaczynski, states that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling and caused widespread psychological suffering.

Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad in 2001. It's especially great for teaching younger people about business, finance, and money.

The Herb garden of the Unchanged Scoundrels, Arto Paasilinna. An unflinching and irreverent story about the secrets that lie within a former Soviet Union kolkhoz. Inspector Jalmari Jyllänketo is sent to western Lapland to investigate a farm that was once a Soviet Union kolkhoz. The farm is filled with organic herbs, Christmas trees, and mushrooms, but the mushroom cultivation area at the bottom of the farm’s former iron mine is actually a private concentration camp managed by the owner of the farm, who has built a workforce out of criminals catch by the security guards of the farm.

King Larry: The Life and Ruins of a Billionaire Genius, by James Scurlock is about a guy that most people have never heard of — Larry Hillblom the 'H' in delivery company DHL. Larry was probably one of the most free and liberated people who ever lived. He literally made his own rules and fought constantly against big industry, government, the media, and more. As an example, Hillblom was the kind of guy who bought an airplane and just jumped in the cockpit to fly it. No license, no training, he just assumed he'd figure it out. That's the way he lived his entire life. (Three guesses how he died...)

The Lessons of History, by Will and Ariel Durant is, in my opinion, the finest book on general history ever written. Enough said.

The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer. Mass movements tend to attract the same type of followers, whether radical or reactionary, sports or politics, religion or environmental activism, they behave in the same way and use the same tactics and rhetorical tools.

Anything written by Friedrich Nietzsche can be given as a alarm clock for those who still believe that one´s present life should be offered as a sacrifice in change for a pleasant seat in a comfortable Heaven.