In my copious spare time, I've been reading The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig von Mises. The book was written in 1912, but it feels like it was written in an alternate universe where only gold and silver are really money and the slips of paper we accept nowadays are a simple fraud. Fascinating.
(When I was a teenager I devoured just about everything by Mises, but perhaps it's time to bone up on economics again...)