I'm going to go ahead and recommend the entire Vorkosigan saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold. I advise reading in chronological timeline order (except for the prequel "Falling Free" which only loosely bears on the rest of the series's events and characters - so start with Shards of Honor). Before I read these books I had heard HPMoR glossed as "Miles Vorkosigan attends Hogwarts", and while this does neither character perfect justice, it was a lot truer than I anticipated.

• The Truth
• Going Postal
• Making Money
• Raising Steam

"The second interesting thing about angels, Mr. Lipwig, is that you only ever get one."

August books (no nonfiction, procrastinating on reading a few):

• Worm (review)
• Echopraxia, Peter Watts (review)
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Marquez (review)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (review)

This is an information bounty, in exchange for helping me out I'm offering a half hour of my time (best redeemed through EA, corresponding research or teaching anything you need to know about civil engineering.) Now to the request so unreasonable that I felt compensation was necessary.

I once read a transhumanism short story by Isaac Asimov but have forgot the title and short story collection it was in, I'm trying to find this story again. The plot summary goes as such: A retired businessman is reminiscing about the frontier days of cognitive enhancement where 'chipped' professionals were a high value rarity and his firm was so lucky to have the opportunity to interview two at the same time and he had to choose which one to hire. A key limiter to the 'chipping' was that those professionals were ten times as smart for one tenth the productive lifespan, meaning early onset of senility and retirement. The retired businessman laments that the current generation of 'chipping' is so dialed down and legislated that they are nothing special.

If this rings a bell and you can give me a title to this short story, you will have my eternal gratitude (redeemable for one half hour of time.)