Reading Fisher is an ideological experience revealed in adjectival preferences (“honest wine”) and unusual obsessions: serving your guests what you damn well please, since it’ll be so good they won’t care—or the sanctity and sexiness of knowing how to order food for yourself, precisely and lavishly. As you puzzle over why an essay about soul mates should focus on fondue, or a story about curry on conviction, you’ll see what this collection shows better than others: The food is a metaphor.

—Heather Horn, senior associate editor

Random House

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

One far off day, when software and intelligent robots have usurped our jobs and we poor humans are left with little to do but stuff our faces while pondering life’s mysteries and miseries in front of the television, I like to imagine there will be at least one prominent cult dedicated Kurt Vonnegut and the divine revelations contained in his debut novel, Player Piano.

I kid. Mostly. A Vonnegut cult would be sort of amazing, aside from deeply ironic in a way I’m sure he’d appreciate. But the bigger point is that, for a book published in 1952, Player Piano does an eerily good job nailing the anxieties we feel about the future of technology and the economy today—which is why it’s become a go-to literary reference for us notoriously uncultured business and tech writers. Vonnegut imagines a dystopic United States where most jobs have, yes, been taken over by machines, and industry is ruled by an elite clique of over-educated managers and engineers. The economy is centrally planned by a powerful computer named EPICAC XIV. And if your test scores aren’t good enough to get you into college, you’re shuffled off to the army or a mostly useless public-works crew known as the Reeks and Wrecks.

Aside from the socialist overtones (in Vonnegut's world, the government passes a tax on machines to pay for public welfare programs, which is a concept I somehow doubt would make it through today’s Congress) it’s a future that at least a few economists think is frighteningly near.

Which is partly just a sign of how old these fears really are. We’ve been worrying about technology stealing our jobs since the Luddites started smashing looms. Vonnegut, for his part, wrote the book after seeing how General Electric had begun replacing its factory workers with punch-card operated machines. But I wouldn’t be recommending Player Piano if it were just a maybe-prescient piece of retro-futurism. The book is also a hilarious, thoughtful, and humane meditation on the meaning of work, petty office politics, inequality, class resentment, midlife crises, bad marriages, and college football. So go read it—you know, before we’re living it.

—Jordan Weissmann, senior associate editor

Scholastic Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling It’s been more than 15 years since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was first released in the U.S.—and for many young people, including me, Harry’s subsequent years’ worth of adventures blur inextricably with our own childhood memories. So this year, when I revisited Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, it was like revisiting an album of my own baby pictures: both sentimental and startling. First, of course, I was delighted all over again by all the tiny, enchanting details that have eroded from my memories of Harry Potter over time—in the same way the “Dad, you wore that to the hospital when I was born? Nana anxiously munched through how many bags of peanut M&Ms in the waiting room?” kinds of minutiae fade out from oft-retold family stories. For instance: When Hagrid arrives at Harry’s home on his 11th birthday and changes his life forever, he brings Harry a “slightly squashed” chocolate cake with “Happy Birthday Harry” written in green frosting—and later, it seems, he ends up eating it himself. And when Albus Dumbledore first explains why wizards shouldn’t be afraid to utter Voldemort’s name, he does so distractedly, his attention focused instead on unsticking a pair of lemon drop candies. But then, as is inevitable when you reflect as an adult on your own childhood, I found that suddenly the grown-ups in the story had a point of view—it’s like that moment you first recognize the barely veiled terror in your young parents’ eyes as they posed, smiling, outside their front door the day they first brought you home from the hospital. Even the most evil of the seemingly evil adults of Sorcerer’s Stone (like Professor Snape, or Petunia and Vernon Dursley), it turns out, aren’t wicked so much as frightened and protective, and rightly so: The wizarding world, like the real one, is a scarier place than the younger characters even realize. But all these years later, I discovered, Harry Potter's world is still worth returning to—not least to marvel at J.K. Rowling’s ability to tell a children’s story wise, earnest, and complex enough to grow up with its readers. —Ashley Fetters, associate editor Times Books The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer

If you want to understand America’s place in the world today—from Iran’s deep distrust of U.S. intentions, to Latin America’s brand of populist anti-Americanism, to the American public’s fatigue with military interventions overseas—you need to understand John Foster and Allen Dulles, arguably the two most powerful brothers our country has ever produced. And you can’t fully appreciate the Dulles brothers without reading Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers, which chronicles how Foster and Allen—the heads of the State Department and CIA, respectively—waged an audacious anti-communist shadow war in countries ranging from Guatemala to Iran to Vietnam during the 1950s, a period in U.S. history that we tend to think of as relatively peaceful.