mikewarot

The Art of Electronics - Horowitz and Hill - All the nitty gritty details you'll need if you're to be a good electronics designer

I second the nomination of Simon Winchester's book "The Perfectionists"

Computer Lib/Dream Machines - Ted Nelson -- Quite a bit of ideas about computers, I read it decades ago.

I also found Longitude[2]: "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" to be an interesting account

Read 1632 by Eric Flint, deeply embedded in it is a lesson about the infrastructure that keeps modern society going.

1632 by Eric Flint

The 1632 series by Eric Flint changed my perspective on what it takes to keep modern civilization going.

1632 by Eric Flint - it became a series. I can read them over and over.

1632 - Eric Flint Not quite science fiction, but it's an alternative history

I found Herbert Hoover's translation of De Re Metallica[1] to be fascinating.

Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805 -- By Eric Sloane -- Early Americans really knew their shit, we tend to think of them as simpler people, this book dispelled me of that stupid notion.

Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805.

the books I had from the 1632 Series by Eric Flint

Boys Second Book of Electronics - Alfred Morgan, 1957 -- Introduced me to the idea that I could make my own radio or anything electronic I wanted to make.

The adolescence of P-1 - Thomas Joseph Ryan - Introduced me to the idea of random walks leading to AI.

"The Boy's Second Book of Electronics"

The Boy's Second Book of Radio and Electronics - by Alfred Morgan (1957).