I recently read and enjoyed Orlando by Virginia Woolf. It tells the story of an English nobleman who lives for hundreds of years and accumulates a bunch of expe

I recently read and enjoyed Orlando by Virginia Woolf. It tells the story of an English nobleman who lives for hundreds of years and accumulates a bunch of experiences. To me, its main point is about the fluidity of identity and what it means to age (or not). It's also just a fun and funny centuries-spanning story full of great sentences like these "Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights." I'm not sure it's useful for programmers in particular -- maybe all this stuff about the ad-hoc nature of identity will help you choose what language to learn next or something :)