"Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hopfstadter. I was in high school when it came out, and it really opened my eyes up to the field of computability. The philosop

"Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hopfstadter. I was in high school when it came out, and it really opened my eyes up to the field of computability. The philosophy was interesting, too. "Holy the Firm" by Annie Dillard. Not really about religion, more about our relationship to the world. A beautifully written little book. "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. This one works on me at several levels: The physics (which are explained well), the sheer titanic scope of the Manhattan project, and the meta-knowledge that someone was able to write a book this good. "The C Programming Language", by Kernighan and Ritchie. Probably the single most influential book on programming that I've read.