This is a place to consolidate book recommendations.
I'm reading The Logic of Failure and enjoying it quite a bit. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard of it here, and I found a post here called Great Books of Failure, an article which hadn't crossed my path before.
There's a recent thread about books for a gifted young teen and a slightly less recent discussion of books on cogsci thread which might or might not be found by someone looking for good books.
So, what books or lists of books do you recommend?
I also have a pretty jaded opinion of that same category of dabblers in science fiction, but I didn't really perceive Hesse in that light.
I identify "science-fictiony" books as being not only about technology, but about unusual, daring ideas taken to their logical conclusions; e.g. Borges and Calvino would usually qualify. But I didn't find Glass Bead Game to be focused on that; I found the most gripping parts of the book to be Knecht's intellectual and spiritual development, and how each of the characters negotiated the balance between a life of the mind and the rest of the world. Not very SF.
However, it's true that the big "idea", the Game itself, was immensely attractive to me, in a science-fictiony way, and maybe in a narcissistic way. I wish Hesse had been alive to learn computer programming; perhaps he would have had something to say about that.
Makes sense. I suppose that my objection is not to idea fiction being done by literary types (I like Borges a LOT) but to world-building done by literary types (other than David Foster Wallace, but he's more the 'genius-polymath' type), which is what I really think gets the critical acclaim despite being pretty uniformly awful when compared to even competent SF.