I had a hard time stomaching some chapters of This Is Vegan Propaganda because it does the Uninhabitable Earth thing of beating you to death with depressing facts. The book aims to convince people to become vegan on, mostly, a moral basis. While I am the easiest audience for that, I didn't find their argument very convincing to people who aren't already open to consider the feelings of nonhuman animals.

Read Ryan Holiday's The Perennial Seller which is an easy read that succinctly explains what it takes to be successful long-term as a creator or entrepreneur. It's a good book to gift anyone who wants to become a writer, entrepreneur or artist and can use an honest talk on the hard part of creating for a living, being dispiriting only to those who probably wouldn't have made it anyway. As always with Ryan's books I don't think it's the best read, but I got a bunch of useful things out of his clarity of thought.

It is much better than Tony Fadell's Build, which is a SV techbro trying to generalize his life's luck into advice. I quit a third of the way into it because none of it was of any use.

Another book I gave a good shot is The Murderer's Ape, a Swedish novel that's probably fantastic to read aloud as a bedtime story and is endearingly written, but not the kind of book I enjoy reading myself in no small part because there was little to no plot.