Dreams From My Father

Written before Obama was a candidate for almost anything in 1992, which is a treat.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency

By Alexander McCall Smith

Just read _anything_ by this author.  It's all great.

The Early Asimov Book One

It's great to read this - It turns out you don't have to start good to wind up that way.

The Divine Invasion

by Philip K. Dick

Qualitatively different from his other books, I think - like, Shakespeare started writing romances late in his career? This is one of PKD's, uh, Godmances?

Cryptonomicon

by Neal Stephenson

I remember being around people like this. I remember learning these things.

The Turk

by Tom Standage

MUST BUILD WOODEN ROBOT

Hard to be a God

by Arkady and Boris Strugatski

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

by Jules Verne

Jules Verne's science fiction is from a time when "scientist" means "person who knows the scientific name of thousands and thousands of fishes."

Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor Frankl

Sounds way ahead of his time.

Honeymoon in Purdah

by Alison Wearing

Wow. I have to go to Iran.

9 Stories

by J.D. Salinger

He's always fun to read, especially if you want to be miserable.

Quartet: Four Masterpieces of Great Fiction

by W. Somerset Maugham

A cheesy package (tired of reading masterpieces of regular fiction?) for some interesting stories. I read exactly enough of R.C. Sherriff's screenplays to know that they were terrible. Namely, the final scenes, in which Maugham's secret intention for all the endings to be happy was finally realized.

Things Fall Apart

by Chinua Achebe

So many proverbs! Imagine how awesome it would be if you talked like that. Also, colonialism WTF.

The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

Super cool. Try to find the translation I have: It is translated very directly from the original, which makes every sentence sound upside-down and backwards.

Scourge: the once and future threat of smallpox

by Jonathan B. Tucker

Interesting, and much less frightening than you would think.