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Filing taxes means slogging through a lot of tax publications. But with Tax Day behind us, we now can read about taxes and money for fun. Here are some suggestions.
How’s your first weekend after Tax Day going? I’m chilling, sleeping late this Saturday, and enjoying some pastries with my coffee.
I’m also catching up on newspapers, the printed editions I still have tossed onto my driveway. As April 15 neared, I had just skimmed for highlights. Today, I found out what I missed.
And nestled in there among the usual political drama and movie and television reviews and articles, The New York Times Book Review offered a tax gem.
Tax-themed reading for fun, not filing: Joumana Khatib, writing for the Sunday literary magazine’s Read Like the Wind column, focused on money. And given that it was just days before April 15, she highlighted a couple tax themed books.
When I went searching for the online version to share with you, dear readers of the ol’ blog, I discovered that this actually was an older column. Khatib’s “2 Books About Other People’s Money” actually was first published on April 13, 2024, and updated April 14, 2024.
This, this past Sunday, April 12, it was run again in the NYT’s printed Book Review. (This is one reason I still get the messy printed versions.)
Despite, or maybe because of, the frequent reprinting, I thought it would be a good post Tax Day 2026 is weekend’s Saturday Shout Out.
Khatib argues that taxes “offer ample material, it seems to me, starting with the existential questions they bring up. What is my life worth? What do I owe? What is enough?”
She also confesses to having “a perverse patience for the U.S. tax code, not least because I marvel at the obstinacy of its idiom.” She’s one of us, tax peeps! And also points out a universal truth: it’s fun to read about other people’s money.
Tax writings, fictional and real life: The first of the two books Khatib suggests we read is “The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest,” by Edmund Wilson.
The writer, literary critic, and journalist recounts his experiences after he decided, between 1946 and 1955, to not file tax returns. As you might suspect, things did not go well.
Khatib’s second recommendation with a tax hook is “Refund: Stories” by Karen E. Bender. It’s a fictional collection of stories organized around money. Who has it, who needs it, who would debase himself to get more. She had me at debase.
But wait! There’s more: The online version of the column also suggests a couple lighter-weight money- and/or tax-related publications:
- Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar mystery series about British tax barristers, and
- Rebecca Curtis’ story collection “Twenty Grand,” which is subtitled “And Other Tales of Love and Money” and hyped even more on Amazon as “Provocative and Poignant Stories of Betrayal, Desire, and Wicked Humor.”
On a more serious note, she suggests Andrew W. Kahrl’s “The Black Tax,” which examines the extent to which taxes have disenfranchised Black Americans. Racial bias in tax matters is an issue the Internal Revenue Service acknowledged during Congressional inquiries under a prior presidential administration.
IRS as a literary star: Finally, Khatib also referenced in her intro one of my faves, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel “The Pale King.” I blogged about this book twice, back in April 2011 and again in February 2014, and the photo below is of my copy. This book, says Khatib, “momentarily elevated the I.R.S. into a literary sensation.”
With your taxes done, or at least on extension, take advantage of less taxing time by picking up one of these books.
You can find a few more suggestions in my post from last December, Books with financial hooks to give (to yourself, too!) this holiday season.
If you have other financial or tax themed tomes you recommend, please share by leaving a mini-review, or at least the title, in the comments.
