(I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".) - GEB - SICP - anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse - most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle" - Joan Didion, "Where I Was From" - Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software" - Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis" - Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"
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