Ask HN: What book should I buy for my 18th birthday?

Check out "The Timeless Way of Building" if you want non fiction or anything by Vonnegut. I'd personally start with Cat's Cradle.

I'd highly recommend "rich dad poor dad."

At 18, you're probably too broke to use the information in it but it will lay down a strategy for building wealth as soon as you start getting income. IF I had it 15 years ago, I'd be a millionaire today. There's a lot of decisions I would have done differently had I read it at the time.

Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to reading Solarpunk fiction yet. I've heard Le Guin's "The Dispossessed" is recommended as a proto-Solarpunk novel. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk#Literature for more fiction suggestions.

Das Kapital

And

The Wealth of Nations

Looking back on what I read when I was around your age, I think I benefitted less from reading entire books straight through than I did from browsing through magazines and books as my interests led me. I spent a lot of time in libraries, wandering the stacks and reading rooms and stopping to read whatever caught my eye. Bound volumes of old general-interest magazines—The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Strand Magazine—were particularly absorbing, though I also dipped into a lot of books.

That library-browsing experience is now available through the Internet Archive. Some semirandom magazine examples are at [1, 2, 3]; some books are at [4, 5, 6]. There are millions more.

If HN had existed when I was eighteen, I would have enjoyed—and benefitted from—reading the articles and discussions here, too, perhaps almost as much as I do now at the age of sixty-four.

[1] https://archive.org/details/notesqueries12unse_0

[2] https://archive.org/details/blackwoodsedinb191unkngoog

[3] https://archive.org/details/sim_harpers-magazine_1903-03_106...

[4] https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount01stau

[5] https://archive.org/details/russiannihilisme00buel

[6] https://archive.org/details/cottonkingdomtra00inolms