I have 2. The People's Republic of Walmart is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize.
And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish Bullshit Jobs. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
At least for me, one of the reasons why I find the idea of Italian city-states having an early form of capitalism convincing is because the ruling ideology of those Italian city-states wasn't particularly feudal. You can draw a straight line from Renaissance humanism espoused by intellectuals like Erasmus to Protestantism and finally to liberalism of the Enlightenment. Renaissance humanism was also a break from feudal ideology by stressing on the individual, the hallmark of all subsequent capitalist ideologies like liberalism.
I interpret the Renaissance's fascination of ancient Greek and Roman text as a rejection of feudal ideology. Since capitalism didn't exist yet/barely existed, capitalist ideology also didn't exist/is barely developed, so they can't just replace feudal ideology with liberalism but instead had to reach for some nonfeudal ideology, which in the Italian city-states' context, would be the intellectual works produced by societies organized under the slavery mode of production. This nonfeudal ideology would be further intellectually developed until it finally emerged in its mature form as liberalism.
I've been thinking a lot about this because I think you made some really good points, especially with your second paragraph. With the first I would just say that modes of production can coexist even if one is always dominant, and when one dominant mode is replaced by another, the current dominant mode can subsume the ideology of previous modes for its own ends. Italy itself was probably always the most Roman place in the entire feudal world, especially with regard to its continuous trade links with the Arabs and Byzantines, who themselves practiced slight variations on the slave mode of production. (Slavery still existed in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; some of the most successful city-states like Venice and Genoa were powered by the slave trade.) I want to say it was Cardinal Bessarion or some other Byzantine intellectuals fleeing to Italy from the Byzantine world in 1453 who helped kick off the Renaissance devotion to ancient Greece and Rome, although Italian intellectuals like Dante and Petrarch who were active a century earlier obviously helped a lot. Renaissance humanism to me seems like a reawakening and further development of the ideological superstructure of Roman slavery. The fact that you can draw a straight line from Erasmus to Locke doesn't necessarily mean that Erasmus was living under a capitalist mode of production. Capitalism itself still utilizes feudal ideas (Leonard Leo, architect of the modern SCOTUS, is literally a hospitaller); feudalism likewise used Roman ideas even in the middle of the Middle Ages (Charlemagne called himself Emperor of the Romans for instance but there are many other examples).