[warning: you won't find any useful identity related info in this post]   I recently moved to a new apartment, and while unboxing the books I had to decide on a criteria for shelving them in our wonderful black billy . Hierarchies sucks, because they force you to choose a single criteria for slicing your data: but with physical objects, it's hard to use tagging :-) I decided to dedicate one shelf to the books that had the most influence on my past & recent development: and I'm going to spend some of this Saturday night writing it down here. I excluded all the classics from school time, you won't find " The Prince " or " The Divine Comedy " in this list but that doesn't mean that I didn't metabolize them; the same goes for pure-entertainment novels & poets, no Hyperion or Montale here; the same goes for scholastic programming, no Knuth , Sliberschatz or Code Complete ; or for the books that I have but I didn't find the time to read yet, like The Long Tail (bought from Anderson himself when he came to present it @ campus) or  " Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman "; we have to draw a line somewhere :-)   Godel Escher Bach - Douglas Hofstadter Simply fantastic. Should be mandatory reading for orientation courses pre-computer science. I didn't really understand recursion until I read GEB; the godelization is one of the most useful concepts ever; messages/codes/meaning, 'nuff said. The Mind's I - Hofstadter & Dennett A great book. Read More...