(I'm going to ignore the prohibition on "programming/technical books".)

- GEB

- SICP

- anything by Paul Auster or Hermann Hesse

- most Haruki Murakami, especially "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle"

- Joan Didion, "Where I Was From"

- Richard P. Gabriel, "Patterns of Software"

- Durbin, Eddy, Krogh, and Mitchison, "Biological Sequence Analysis"

- Italo Calvino, "if on a winter's night a traveller"