David Simon's "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets"<p><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18956.Homicide" rel="nofollow">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18956.Homicide</a><p>I wish it were required reading in at least all journalism school curriculums. It's a book about death and the most "exciting" part of police work but also one that reveals the banality and politically-motivated mechanics of such a system. I almost hesitate to call it "thought-provoking" because it, among other things, is just a great page-turner, though astonishingly completely non-fiction. I say "astonishingly" because Simon, according to him and the detectives he wrote about, had pretty much free reign to write what he wanted...there's no way such a book could be written today, as the police tactics that Simon describe, out of context, would likely cause a lot of outrage today.<p>As a bonus, reading "Homicide" will make all of the jargon in "The Wire" much more understandable. Many of the memorable incidents in "The Wire", including the very first scene, and scenes like the photocopier-used-as-lie-detector, come straight from "Homicide"
I can't choose one, but I'd cite:<p>* Jonathan Haidt's <i>The Righteous Mind</i>, for explaining so much personally and culturally so concisely.<p>* Everything on this list: <a href="http://jakeseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-is" rel="nofollow">http://jakeseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-th...</a>.<p>* <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, for its combination of story, interior drama, and (underrated) political economy.<p>* <i>Blindsight</i> by Peter Watts.<p>* <i>Heart of Darkness</i> by Conrad, who seems more prophetic all the time.
I'm sure there are many, but a few that jump to mind, in no particular order, and spanning both fiction and non-fiction:<p><i>The Selfish Gene</i> - Dawkins<p><i>A New Kind of Science</i> - Wolfram<p><i>The Singularity is Near</i> - Kurzweil<p><i>Gödel, Escher, Bach</i> - Hofstadter<p><i>Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies</i> - Hofstadter<p><i>Atlas Shrugged</i> - Rand<p><i>The Fountainhead</i> - Rand<p><i>Nineteen Eighty-Four</i> - Orwell<p><i>The Trouble With Physics</i> - Lee Smolin<p><i>Time Reborn</i> - Lee Smolin<p><i>Ambient Findability</i> - Peter Morville<p><i>Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software</i> - Steven Johnson<p><i>Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age</i> - Duncan Watts<p><i>Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life</i> - Albert-laszlo Barabasi<p><i>Artificial Life</i> - Steven Levy<p><i>The Four Steps To The Epiphany</i> - Steve Blank<p><i>The World is Flat</i> - Thomas Friedman<p>not a book, but the various writings of Douglas Engelbart - <a href="http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dougengelbart.org/library/library.html</a><p><i>Glasshouse</i> - Charles Stross<p><i>Permutation City</i> - Greg Egan<p><i>Neuromancer</i> - William Gibson<p><i>The Shockwave Rider</i> - John Brunner<p><i>The Society of Mind</i> - Marvin Minsky<p><i>The Origin of Wealth: The Radical Remaking of Economics and What it Means for Business and Society</i> - Eric Beinhocker<p><i>The Black Swan</i> - Nassim Nicholas Taleb<p><i>Fooled By Randomness</i> - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"The Law" by Frédéric Bastiat (<a href="http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html" rel="nofollow">http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html</a> or various PDFs floating around the web)<p>Times change, people do not
Two books come to mind almost immedatley one fiction, the other non-fiction.<p>The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, this really shook my belief in the meaning of ordered data.<p>Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, I read this right after I finished high-school, and it turned a math-hating young man into a math obsessed man.
<i>Nine Hundred Grandmothers</i>, by R.A. Lafferty (out of print except for "The Books of Sand")<p><i>Last and First Men</i>, by Olaf Stapledon, free at <a href="http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2028/last-and-first-men" rel="nofollow">http://www.feedbooks.com/book/2028/last-and-first-men</a><p><i>Accelerando</i>, by Charles Stross, free at <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...</a><p><i>The Doubter's Companion</i>, by John Ralston Saul, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Doubters-Companion-Dictionary-Aggressive/dp/0743236602" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/The-Doubters-Companion-Dictionary-Aggr...</a>
"Chaos",James Gleick<p>Maybe not the best book for understanding chaos theory, but I have not stopped seeing stochastic patterns and applying concepts of fractal geometry to things I come across in life as I attempt to wrap my mind around some of the deeply complex phenomena in the universe. Whether being enraptured by the flitting and fluttering of a curtain in a breeze, or in observing the fundamental structure of a trees growth and branching.
The whole concept of the poincare section completely blew my mind open, even though the math was well over my head. The book stunned my feeble mind. Even though it has been about 15 years, no scientifically centered book has resonated as strongly since.<p>As an aside: GEB has come up so often it has reminded me that it was on my short list of books to read once upon a time, alas, before the internet stole my time.
A tudatállapotok szivárványa by Andrew Feldmar<p>How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by Harry Browne<p>A Guide To The Good Life: The Ancient Art Of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine
My field is CS. Clearly undergraduate-level biology books. For instance, try a book on zoology. The multicellular organism is amazing. Think of yourself - a big blob of cooperating cells, each a little complex wonder in itself, originating from just a single self-organizing/self-building cell. And it has all evolved by itself!
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand<p>Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky<p>These are the most intelligent and well written books I've ever read. Authors are amazing at thinking clearly, and expressing their ideas. Stories are fantastic, and the author's philosophies are amazing and mind-expanding.
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Godel Escher Bach
Time enough for love - Heinlein
Illusions -Richard Bach
A wrinkle in time
Stranger from the depths
Sidartha and all the other books by Hess
Zen MInd Beginners mind
MOre to come<p>Books by Bradbury
Books by asimov<p>Just starting Antifragile and it might make the list
I really liked reading "How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the secrets of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time" and we followed all of the suggestions while building our app.
These two books are must reads for sure (Or must listens, both are well narrated in audio book form)<p>* The One Thing By Gary Keller and Jay Papasan<p>* Soft Skills By John Sonmez
My two cents:<p>The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins - makes you look at living beings as software, and at the world as an immense optimization algorithm.<p>Permutation City by Greg Egan - the perfectly rational idea that the mind is computable is rife with apparently unsolvable paradoxes.<p>Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Maths, logic, patterns, artificial intelligence, beauty, art and self-referentiality.