All these had a huge impact on me. The descriptions are inadequate, I've just tried to mention the subject matter. Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand - how males and females talk different languages. Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By - how our language and thoughts are built from a fabric of conceptual metaphors. Philosophy In The Flesh is about the conceptual metaphors that philosophy is built from. Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century - WWI, WWII and other wars, nazism, communism etc Plutarch's Lives - biographies and stories from famous ancient Greeks and Romans. Amazing how little's changed. Lin Yutang, The Importance of Understanding - introduced me to ancient Chinese philosophers. The Importance of Living - introduced me to ancient Chinese writers, poets and the Chinese way of life. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach - read it when I was 14, and I was into music, art and programming, so it blew my mind. Susan Faludi, STIFFED - men, work, jobs, masculinity, 20th C Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion - media, war, propaganda, democracy Noam Chomsky's political books…
Also recommended in this reply
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
- Metaphors We Live By
- Philosophy in the Flesh
- The Art of Possibility
- Plutarch's Lives
- Computers, Patterns, Chaos, and Beauty
- Culture and Society 1780–1950
- Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
- Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
- The Importance of Living
- The Importance of Understanding
- Voltaire's Bastards
- You Just Don't Understand