In the past few years I've read a lot of sci fi. Altered Carbon, Starship Troopers and Orphans of the Sky by Heinlein, the Ender saga including Ender in Exile, the Worthing Saga also by Orson Scott Card, Project Hail Mary, Rite of Passage. The shortest ones are Rite of Passage and Orphans of the Sky, and they're also the two that left me with the most interesting thoughts and questions. So those are the two I would recommend to anyone who hasn't read sci fi in a while.

I've also gotten into satire recently. Gulliver's Travels and the Adventures of Huck Finn are the main ones.

I also did most of Institutes of the Christian Religion which was dry but very surprising. Calvin's name today is shorthand for a few protestant theological positions, and those are in the book, but they are not the main idea of the book. The point Calvin keeps looping back to is that the popes and the priests of his day were using dubious theology as an excuse to intervene in political affairs however they wanted. They would change their theology to suit their goals. Calvin did not think every Christian needed systematic theology, nor did he think his opponents were wrong about everything. He agreed with them about a lot of things. He was only hoping to build an elite of systematic thinkers that would be able to spot and resist the new stuff, the type of new stuff that would be used to justify a new interference in the political process somewhere. However if you look at Calvin's life, he also interfered in politics. His defenders would say that the judges and civil ministers begged him to, and he only did so reluctantly, we will never know if this is true. But he did do it.

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