Life changing books

Via BoingBoing, New Scientist has posted some recommendations of life-changing books from 17 scientists. They're all very interesting.

1. Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist
   
   
2. The Art of the Soluble - V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
   
   
3. Animal Liberation - Jane Goodall, primatologist
   
   
4. The Foundation trilogy - Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
   
   
5. Alice in Wonderland - Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
   
   
6. One, Two, Three... Infinity - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
   
   
7. The Idea of a Social Science - Harry Collins, sociologist of science
   
   
8. Handbook of Mathematical Functions - Peter Atkins, chemist
   
   
9. The Mind of a Mnemonist - Oliver Sacks, neurologist
   
   
10. A Mathematician’s Apology - Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
    
    
11. The Leopard - Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
    
    
12. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior - Frans de Waal, psychologist and ethologist
    
    
13. Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes - Lawrence Krauss, physicist
    
    
14. William James, Writings 1878-1910 - Daniel Everett, linguist
    
    
15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Chris Frith, neuroscientist
    
    
16. The Naked Ape - Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
    
    
17. King Solomon's Ring - Marion Stamp Dawkins, Zoologist

An interesting mix of fiction and non-fiction which shows that scientists are certainly not the narrow specialists that the stereotype makes them out to be.

Myself, for me the life-changing book as a software developer has to have been Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers. For a fiction work, it's a lot harder for me to decide on one particular book. However, some particularly important authors to me when I was in the 18 to 22 time frame would have been Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad, H.P. Lovecraft and Samuel R. Delany.