
From the Flap: The Master at his scarifying best! From heart-pounding terror to the eeriest of whimsy--tales from the outer limits of one of the greatest imaginations of our time! Evil that breathes and walks and shrieks, brave new worlds and horror shows, human desperation bursting into deadly menace--such are the themes of these astounding works of fiction. In the tradition of Poe and Stevenson, of Lovecraft and The Twilight Zone, Stephen King has fused images of fear as old as time with the iconography of contemporary American life to create his own special brand of horror--one that has kept millions of readers turning the pages even as they gasp. In the book-length story "The Mist," a supermarket becomes the last bastion of humanity as a peril beyond dimension invades the earth... Touch "The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands," and say your prayers... There are some things in attics which are better left alone, things like "The Monkey"... The most sublime woman driver on earth offers a man "Mrs. Todd's Shortcut" to paradise... A boy's sanity is pushed to the edge when he's left alone with the odious corpse of "Gramma"... If you were stunned by Gremlins, the Fornits of "The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet" will knock your socks off... Trucks that punish and beautiful teen demons who seduce a young man to massacre; curses whose malevolence grows through the years; obscene presences and angels of grace--here, indeed, is a night-blooming bouquet of chills and thrills. )
The Emperors New Mind - Roger Penrose
Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglass Hoffstadter
Brocas Brain - Carl Sagan
The (mis)Behavior of Markets - Benoit Mandelbrot
The Black Swan - Nicholas Nassem Taleb
Fiction
Gates Of Fire - Stephen Pressfield
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Hardwired - Walter Jon Williams
Altered Carbon - Richard Morgan
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson
Space - Stephen Baxter
Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
Skeleton Crew - Stephen King
I've given away a lot of books. I'm old.
I got really mad at Stephen King for writing himself into the Dark Tower books, but I kind of get it. I see the last two books especially as Steve plowing through a story he'd basically given up on as un-finishable, because he also couldn't not finish them. Putting himself in as a character is his apology to us as readers for there being no possible satisfactory conclusion to the series.
edit: remove redundant redundancy