Book 4: Stranger in a Strange Land

This 1961 sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein is pretty fun. Picture it: one day in the future, a team of astronauts successfully lands on Mars. A baby is born and due to all sorts of complicated circumstances, the adults all die. The human baby is raised by Martians. 25 years later (or so) another human expedition lands on Mars with much-improved technology. They meet the Martians and take the human Martian back to Earth.

Valentine Michael Smith, the human Martian, knows how to use his mind to communicate telepathically, move things with telekinesis, and control his own heartbeat and body temperature. He can teach these things to the rest of the humans, if they're willing to learn.

He thinks that our ideas about nudity and monogamy are ridiculous (what? this was written by a man as the buttoned-down 1950s concluded? and there's a huge -- though not explicit -- focus on sex, sex, sex?)

This is pretty good for a sci-fi book. It's always fun for me to see what people thought life would be like NOW. Heinlein foresaw traveling to Mars, self-driven flying cars, indoor grass as a very luxurious carpet, synthetic foods, world government, and all the same legal complications and social mores as in the '60s.