Watercress

Written by: Andrea Wang and Jason Chin

First line: We are in the old Pontiac, the red paint faded by the years of glinting Ohio sun, pelting rain, and biting snow.

Why you should read this book: A little girl, the American daughter of Chinese immigrants, resents being made to harvest wild watercress out of a ditch with her family—it's hard enough being poor without worrying that someone you know might see you picking weeds in the mud by the side of the road! Although her parents are overjoyed to experience this taste of home, the narrator refuses to touch the delicacy, until her mother, sensing the trouble, shares her own troubling history. With a new understanding of what this food means to her family, the child finds that the watercress is delicious and that she sees her parents in a new light, understanding what they went for before she was born in order for her to grow up as an American kid who had the ability to refuse any food. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: Your parents controlled you with food. 

The Black Snowman

Written by: Phil Mendez and Carole Byard

First line: Somewhere in a lonely grass hut in western Africa, an aged storyteller prepares for the arrival of the village children. 

Why you should read this book: Jacob, a young boy disdainful of his family's economic status and ethnic, cultural heritage, announces that "Everything black is bad" before grudgingly agreeing to help his little brother Peewee build a snowman—a black snowman—with the dirty snow in their neighborhood. When Peewee scrounges a magical kente cloth, brought from Africa centuries earlier, to dress the snowman, their creation comes to life and does its best to teach Jacob to take some pride in the richness of his ancestry. Although not immediately convinced, Jacob gets a second chance to understand who he is and what he can do right now, as catastrophe looms and the snowman's wisdom and history help Jacob save the day. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't let your kids touch anything you perceive as being dirty.

If the World Were a Village

Written by: David J Smith and Shelagh Armstrong

First line: Earth is a crowded place, and it is getting more crowded all the time.

Why you should read this book: This is an introduction to world-mindedness for children, which explains diversity and creates the narrative that we on planet Earth are all in this together, although we are not all the same. The theoretical world village thought experiment reduces the world's 7.2 billion citizens down to 100 people, each representing 72,000 individuals, and explains the breakdown of religions, ethnicity, food security, and other basic concepts based on this much smaller, more manageable number of humans. Interesting and eye-opening, even for adults, with eye-catching images that encourage interaction with the text, along with useful appendices at the end to help further interpret the data.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're already working for the UN.

Shibumi and the Kitemaker

Written by: Mercer Mayer

First line: Many years ago, a baby girl was born to the emperor and empress of a far-away kingdom.

Why you should read this book: Shibumi, as a royal daughter, is protected from the ills of her city and exposed only to beauty. On the day that she first recognizes economic inequality, she begins to conceive of a plan to use her privilege to convince her father to address the social issues in their world. Her plan involves a kitemaker, the largest kite the world has ever seen, and a staunch sense of determination.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You have no problem walling out the ugliness in the world.

Each Kindness

Written by: Jacqueline Woodson

First line: That winter snow fell on everything, turning the world a brilliant white.

Why you should read this book: There's a sense of bittersweet nostalgia on every page, words and images, in the story of a little girl who rejects, out of hand, the new kid in school because her clothes are secondhand. Gradually, as the new girl, Maya, continues to make friendly overtures and the teacher speaks of kind acts, Chloe comes to regret her behavior, but by then it is too late. Maya has left the school, Chloe can never make up for her cruelness, and she must live with the consequences of her childish decisions.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You like being a snob and it never makes you feel bad about yourself.

The Monstore

Written by: Tara Lazar

First line: At the back of Frankensweet's Candy Shoppe, under the last box of sour gum balls, there's a trapdoor.

Why you should read this book: A real crowd-pleaser of a picture book, this is the story of a boy named Zack who purchases a monster named Manfred to keep his sister, Gracie, out of his bedroom. Gracie, apparently a cut above the typical little sister, instead befriends the monster, and the two of them torment Zack exponentially. The Monstore does not offer refunds, and instead baits Zack into purchasing increasing numbers of ineffective monsters until Gracie commands a virtual army of them and Zack is displaced to the basement. At last, Gracie develops a terrible fear of something (not a monster) and requires her big brother's assistance, allowing the world to shift back into balance.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You're looking for an effective way to keep a sibling out of your personal space.

Max's Bunny Business

Written by: Rosemary Wells

First line: The telephone rang.

Why you should read this book: Another story in the popular series about a sloppy, mute toddler rabbit with an annoyingly bossy sister, this book features Ruby and her friend Louise conniving to earn money to purchase trendy costume jewelry and, as usual, not letting Max participate. Once again, Max gets the jump on his older sister and runs a more successful business by appealing to a particularly generous donor. A bit of fluffy fun for little ones.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Struggling to run your own start up and don't have a well-heeled grandma to bail you out of your poorly conceived business plan.

A Shelter in Our Car

Written by : Monica Gunning

First line: Police cars are coming closer!

Why you should read this book: Zettie’s family had high hopes for a better life when they came to America, but now Zettie’s mom can’t find a good job, and they have to sleep in their old car and wash up in the park bathroom, because that's still better than staying at the homeless shelter. Boys at school tease her, and she dreams of her old life in warm Jamaica where her mother made real hot chocolate, or at least a warm shower and a real bed. This illuminating, heartbreaking, and hopeful story details the reality of homelessness among women and children in America.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You’ve decided to tear down your starter mansion to build an even bigger mansion, and you call the police whenever you see a car that doesn't look nice enough for your neighborhood.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Written by: John Perkins

First line: It began innocently enough.

Why you should read this book: Vetted by the NSA and recruited from the Peace Corps by a private corporation, the author spends the majority of his adult years as an economic hit man, his job to convince developing nations to take out massive loans for unnecessary infrastructure development, and pay the money to American firms intent on controlling oil and other resources, after which the small nations would necessarily default on their loans and thus become pawns of the US government, forced to favor US military, industrial, and political interests in exchange for financial leniency. In clear and honest prose, he describes how he accomplished this goal time and again in South America and the Middle East, and how he squashed his conscience time and again, as the financial and personal rewards of his work overwhelmed his moral compass. This chilling and important exposé diffuses the smoke of decades of sinister, secretive American Empire building, beginning with the American coup against Iran's democratically elected leader for the heinous crime of refusing to sell his country out to an oil company, and dramatically details the true forces of history that are relentless in their drive to transform the world into a corporatocracy in which the poorest peoples of the world become slaves to the desires of a small elite class.

Why you shouldn't read this book: On the one hand, if Perkins hadn't gotten quite so dirty, there would be no one to tell this important story, but on the other hand, at times it's hard to swallow his moral equivocation, as he assures the reader over and over than he knew his actions were wrong, but other factors tempted him to continue. But this is an important book, and if you think the war in Iraq is justified, or can't imagine why 9/11 happened, or drive a car that runs on gasoline, you should probably read this book.

Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Written by: Bill McKibben

First line: Imagine we live on a planet. Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat. An inhospitable place.

Why you should read this book: Global warming, the author's data shows, is not a possible threat for our grandchildren, but a reality that has already begun transforming our lovely blue planet into a hot, dangerous, alien world. Climate change has been set into motion, and all calculations show that we have already surpassed the maximum level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (that would be 350 parts per million) necessary to keep thing comfy and verdant. After presenting pages and pages of chilling and disturbing evidence that we've screwed nature and she's going to screw us right back, McKibben describes what we need to do to survive on this new planet: cutting energy usage, investing in renewable, sustainable energy resources, and pulling back from unchecked and dangerous growth and globalization to create vibrant, functional, and self-reliant communities based agriculture, energy, and human networks (don't worry; we get to keep the Internet).

Why you shouldn't read this book: Possibly the most depressing work I have ever read; if you're enamored of your denial and think that oil and fossil fuels are the future, taking this book seriously could come as a real boot to the head.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

Written by: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

First line: Anyone living in the United States in the early 1990s and paying even a whisper of attention to the nightly news or a daily paper could be forgiven for having been scared out of his skin.

Why you should read this book: While some of the most controversial conclusions in this book (e.g. legalizing abortion leads to a drop in crime) have been widely publicized, this entire study of popular beliefs and the actual data that disproves them is eye-opening and frankly fascinating. From a dissection of incentives, to comparisons of disparate groups (sumo wrestlers and public school teachers; real estate agents and the Ku Klux Klan) this book asks you to question your conclusions and examine your reality. When you can use numbers to prove that the most honorable people are cheating or that the most overinvolved parents aren't giving their children a whit of advantage, economics stops being boring and starts describing our world.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't want to know the truth if it means giving up your sacred cows.