• Musical theme: Kahlil Gibran wrote an eloquent essay on music, though good luck finding it.

• Outside your comfort zone: Capitalism as Civilisation by Ntina Tzouvala, a theoretical work which examines how western legal scholars categorized non-western polities based on a racist standard of civilisation and justified colonising them.

• Book from a different cultural background: the Cairo Trilogy by the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, a chronicle of a wealthy family witnessing the instability of the 1930s in British-occupied Egypt.

As for a book from a different cultural background, I remember reading The White Tiger by Indian author Aravind Adiga about 10 years ago and really enjoying it.

Outside your comfort zone / different culture: The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Yeskov. It examines the events of The Lord of The Rings, from the perspective of Mordor and the orcs. Written by a Russian author. Super good, almost better than LotR.

As a suggestion form me (a random on the internet) ultraprocessed people, the science of food that isn't food.

You could read Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson. It's an essay(ish) book about taste in music, funny to read and not too long (~200pg I'd say).

About the comfort zone, you could try and read something about contemporary problems and predicaments. A poison like no other talks about plastics in our everyday life (not fun), or something really old like Seneca's On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It (~100pg)

Ministry for the Future is my favorite sci fi novel, and it looks like we read similar books so you might enjoy it!

Maybe Storm In a Tea Cup by Helen Czerski for a book outside your comfort zone. It's quite the interesting exploration of the principles of physics that underpin the world around us.

The Gold Bug Variations is one of my favorite music-themed books.