askchapo

Disclaimer: I've read a ton of theory over the last year.

My recs for an easy intro are Principles of Communism, Blackcoats and Reds, State and Revolution, and of course, the Manifesto(but Engels is easier to read than Marx and the Manifesto is heavy on Marx-speak). Toss in Wage Labor and Capital, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and maybe Reform or Revolution. That will probably give you a well rounded idea of what socialism really is, why we need to be revolutionaries, why the nuclear family is essentially an arm of capitalism, and also you get a sprinkling of what praxis looked like in the past.

These are all shorter books and even if you aren't a heavy reader, I think they are fairly easy to digest, save for Luxemburg and Marx. Parenti is especially easy to read since his stuff is more recent.

Eventually it might also do you some good to read a bit of Mao or Stalin's stuff on Material and Historical Dialectics. It was hard to understand at first for me but the more I worked it out, the easier it was to learn and now I even find myself looking at a lot of things happening around us from a dialectical lens, so to speak.