The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford -- This book is by the guy presenting Trust Me I'm an Economist, a documentary series on the BBC highlighting how economics pervades most of the decisions we make in our lives from choosing how to travel to who we pick as our partner. The Undercover Economist is a very short read, only 250 very easily digested pages, and it provides theories behind China's booming growth, Cameroon's lack of growth, and demonstrates a whole ton of economic principles and how they relate to real life. It's not as in-depth as the Thomas Sowell books I love, but it's a lot easier to digest.

Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice by Kenneth C. Louden -- I'm still reading this book, but it's all about how to build compilers and source code translators, from the basic scanners through to parsers, analyzers, code generators, and optimizers. What it lacks in depth it appears to make up in breadth, although I'm only several chapters in so far. This book is giving me the kick I needed to give lex and yacc a try.

Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner -- Another mass-market economics book that looks at how the study of economics can demonstrate why certain things happen and why certain things are as they are. This book is very easily accessible, although I think it dumbs down some of the explanations too much.

Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter -- This is a real old-school book that I've seen a lot of veteran programmers recommending to people. It's a really hard book to define but the topic seems to revolve around discovering how animated things can come out of inanimate matter. Or, going further, how intelligent systems can form out of unintelligent rules. The book is absolutely massive and has several narrative styles, including Platonic dialogues. It seems like an ideal book for those interested in artificial intelligence, mathematics, and the search for a 'self'. Heavy stuff.