Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Dillard has a way with words that is both eloquent and a little violent, and she influenced how I writ

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm. Dillard has a way with words that is both eloquent and a little violent, and she influenced how I write just as much as Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach for its captivating presentation of some very complicated ideas (at least to the 17 year old kid who read this for the first time). This book was published around the time that I was growing from hobby programming to writing software as a career, and it exposed me to non-trivial proofs, LISP, and recursion in general. Vernor Vinge's The Peace War. It's a bit stupid, but . . . I want to make the tech in this book become reality :-) Bobbles are sheer fantasy, of course, but the Tinker tech stack would be a lot of fun.