The theme tying these books, articles, and web sites together is that each contains some insight, skill, or bit of information that I feel is valuable for computer scientists. I've accumulated these recommendations over a number of years. The only specific source that I think I should mention is a nice packet of photocopies called The Way of the Net Warriors -- it contains a number of very good articles about research and writing. Unfortunately I don't own a copy of this packet, but using a borrowed copy I wrote down the titles of most of the articles, and some of them appear in this list.

This list can be broadly divided into:

• Non-Fiction
• Fiction
• Articles and Papers
• Web Sites

Non-Fiction

Essential reading:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs -- Harold Abelson, Gerald Sussman, Julie Sussman
• The Mythical Man Month -- Fred Brooks
• Gödel Escher Bach -- Douglas Hofstadter
• Selected Papers on Computer Science -- Donald Knuth
• The New Hacker's Dictionary -- Eric Raymond
• The Sciences of the Artificial -- Herbert Simon
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information -- Edward Tufte
• The Dream Machine -- M. Mitchell Waldrop

Also recommended:

• More Programming Pearls -- Jon Bentley
• Line by Line -- Claire Kehrwald Cook
• A Profile of Mathematical Logic -- Howard DeLong
• A Ph.D. Is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science -- Peter J. Feibelman
• High Stakes, No Prisoners -- Charles H. Ferguson
• Hackers -- Steven Levy
• How to Solve It -- G. Polya
• Cuckoo's Egg -- Cliff Stoll
• Elements of Style -- William Strunk and E. B. White
• Writing for Computer Science -- Justin Zobel

Fiction

Books:

• Alice in Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
• Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland
• Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX -- Carlton Egremont III
• Neuromancer -- William Gibson
• Software -- Rudy Rucker
• Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson
• anything by Vernor Vinge

Short stories:

• The Feeling of Power -- Isaac Asimov
• The Library of Babel -- Jorge Luis Borges

Articles and Papers

Research and Writing:

• Richard Hamming's talk about You and Your Research
• How (and How Not) to Write a Good Systems Paper by Roy Levin
• The Task of the Referee by Alan Jay Smith
• Notes on Presenting Theses by Aaron Sloman
• On Ph.D. Thesis Proposals by H. C. Lauer
• How to Give a Good Research Talk by Simon Peyton Jones, John Hughes, and John Launchbury
• The Science of Scientific Writing by George D. Gopen and Judith A. Swan
• How to Increase the Chances Your Paper is Accepted at ACM SIGCOMM by Craig Partridge
• Efficient Reading of Papers in Science and Technology by Michael J. Hanson
• Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman (from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!)

Classic Systems Papers:

• Butler Lampson's Hints for Computer System Design -- this is worth rereading every year or so
• Jerry Saltzer's End to End Arguments in System Design
• The Unix Timesharing System -- an updated version of the 1974 CACM article
• Needham and Lauer's On the Duality of Operating System Structures
• Lampson and Redell's Experiences with Processes and Monitors in Mesa

Other:

• Alan Perlis's Epigrams in Programming
• Richard Gabriel's Worse is Better
• What common research terms really mean

Web Sites

• ACM's short-lived series of classic paper reprints
• Olin Shivers' dissertation advice and advice to grad students
• Phil Agre's Networking on the Network
• Scholarly Resources for CS undergrads
• Randy Pausch's time management talk
• How to do research at the MIT AI Lab
• Collected Advice on Research and Writing
• The Graduate Student Survival Guide
• Guides to surviving Computer Science graduate school
• Vernor Vinge's essay about the singularity
• Futurist programming
• Great Books in computer science
• Reflections on Academic Success and Failure by Gary T. Marx
• How to Be a Good Graduate Student / Advisor by Marie desJardins
• Some Lecturing Heuristics by Patrick H. Winston

Books I haven't read yet that seem like good candidates for the reading list:

• A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction -- Christopher Alexander
• ACM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years -- Robert Ashenhurst
• Programming Pearls -- Jon Bentley
• Peopleware -- Tom Demarco
• The Armchair Universe -- A. K. Dewdney
• The Soul of a New Machine -- Tracy Kidder
• The Art of Computer Programming -- Donald Knuth
• The Design of Everyday Things -- Donald Norman