What do you want, fiction? Non fiction, self help. Entertaining or thought providing or challenging?
Your question is insanely broad. Also what is the longest single work you have read? Many of the best reads take forever to get going. Also they are insanly long and thus intimidating
Sometimes you can combine an answer to such a question by getting someone to read a relatively compact one like "The Physics of Star Trek". That won't work for people that don't like technology or science, but there are similar examples on other subjects. Works well for people who haven't started asking detailed questions yet, but may expect a fitting answer anyway.
If after starting or even finishing such a book and they like it, it gets a lot easier to recommend more specifically after that. If they don't like it, it either means the book needs to be less complex, or more single-topic and perhaps even non-fiction to remove more unknown elements.
Interesting that The Second Sex is included in this list, given that its author believed that women are generally too stupid to choose what's best for them in life.
> No woman should be authorized to stay home to raise her children. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.
You left out the next sentence, so in context it reads “ ... because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.“
> “ ... women are generally too stupid to choose what’s best for them in life.”
Those are your words, not Simone de Beauvoirs.
I haven’t read “The Second Sex” yet but I have read “The Ethics of Ambiguity” by her.
I would bet a dollar though that Beauvoir considers stupidity an individual human trait generously distributed across all genders.
Here are some other quotes from The Second Sex.
"Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it."
"To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man, not to deny them to her; let her have her independent existence and she will continue nonetheless to exist for him also: mutually recognising each other as subject, each will yet remain for the other an other. The reciprocity of their relations will not do away with the miracles – desire, possession, love, dream, adventure – worked by the division of human beings into two separate categories; and the words that move us – giving, conquering, uniting – will not lose their meaning. On the contrary, when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the 'division' of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form."
I know those are my words, but this is the implicit message I interpret from hers. One must think rather lowly of others (and/or extremely highly of oneself and/or one’s ideology) to claim to know what’s best for those others.
Your question is insanely broad. Also what is the longest single work you have read? Many of the best reads take forever to get going. Also they are insanly long and thus intimidating