Please name two of your most favorite books.
hamilton: Lately I've been staring at the Codex Seriphinianus quite a bit.  Worth finding a copy if you haven't seen it before.From a technical point of view, The Elements of Statistical Learning, by Tibshirani, Friedman, and Hastie.  Far and away the most illuminating demonstration that so many ML / AI techniques have a long-standing statistical foundation, and, essentially, everything boils down to the linear model.