Any fiction by Nevil Shute for a well-written light read, but I especially like his autobiography called Slide Rule. He was number cruncher, pre-computers, for aircraft design, and worked on a private enterprise design and build project for an airship in a sort of economic/design competition, competing with a bungling, bureaucratic government organisation whose airship crashed and burned.

It's only a fairly short book, but I find it extremely interesting from a whole lot of different perspectives.

The coincidence of a couple of things in this thread is kind of odd & spooky because I was just looking at my copy of Godel, Escher & Bach a couple of nights ago - which I haven't actually read yet - and also my small collection of Mary Stewart pot boilers plus Crystal Cave etc and wondering whether to re-read some of them, again. (That's not a tautology, by the way, I mean I have already re-read them all at least once, and I might re-read them again.)

Helen