>Okay, maybe favorite fiction lists have been done, but no one (that I've >noticed) has been listing their favorite non-fiction authors or works. >So... I really liked _Goedel, Escher, Bach_ and _Metamagical Themas_ (the latter is a book that had a profound effect on my thinking about ethics). Hofstadter's other books I didn't find nearly so satisfying, though. Nobody has yet mentioned John McPhee, who has the talent to write about anything interestingly. _Annals of the Former World_ (an omnibus volume of his books about geology: _Rising from the Plains_, _In Suspect Terrane_, _Basin and Range_, and _Assembling California_) contains more sense-of-wonder than a dozen average SF novels, evoking as it does vast sweeps of time so great that the very mountains shoot up like bamboo then melt away like sugar. David Goldfarb <*>|"We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and goldfarb at ocf.berkeley.edu | uncertainty!" | -- Douglas Adams, _The Hitchhiker's goldfarb at csua.berkeley.edu | Guide to the Galaxy_