Q: What should I read this summer to keep up with the latest business megatrends?

A: The best summer business reading is in great literature, not in business bestsellers. By transporting us into other minds and places, literature improves our ability to relate to other people, an essential business quality. It has the capacity to elicit empathy, emotional intelligence and critical thinking, among other fundamental managerial attributes. Humans are natural storytellers because we make sense of and learn from our experience narratively.

So, this summer, if you are looking to learn about artificial intelligence, I suggest Ian McEwan's hilariously serious novel, "Machines Like Me" (2019, Doubleday). Charlie blows most of his inheritance to buy Adam, an artificial human. This leads us to imagine, in more vivid detail than we might envisage on our own, the full realization of artificial intelligence — what it is like to boot up a plastic person, to choose its personality traits, and even to unplug a seemingly sentient being. Along the way, we might consider the market potential of AI, along with its moral peril — for ourselves and others.

For an understanding of how cultural attitudes about immigration can influence business strategy and government functioning, I offer Laila Lalami's novel, "The Other Americans" (2019, Pantheon). Through the medium of a murder mystery, the story shows us in one subplot how fears that emerged after 9/11 still affect the market potential of Muslim-owned businesses. Another subplot reveals how anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by recent politics can obstruct basic instruments of social justice.

These are just two recent novels that will improve your business acumen, but for more classic literature that can impart economic wisdom, I recommend consulting Gary Saul Morson's and Morton Schapiro's "Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities" (2018, Princeton University Press). This book, by a pair of literature and economics scholars, not only tells us that literature can make us measurably better economic actors, it also shows us, through the novels of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy, that what matters is often immeasurable.

Christopher Michaelson is a professor in the ethics and business law department at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.