Holy the Firm

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.

"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.