Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
By Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
The leading textbook in Artificial Intelligence.
Used in over 1000 universities in 91 countries (over 90% market share).
The 85th most cited publication on Citeseer.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach introduces basic ideas in artificial intelligence from the perspective of building intelligent agents, which the authors define as "anything that can be viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon the environment through effectors." This textbook is up-to-date and is organized using the latest principles of good textbook design. It includes historical notes at the end of every chapter, exercises, margin notes, a bibliography, and a competent index. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach covers a wide array of material, including first-order logic, game playing, knowledge representation, planning, and reinforcement learning.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
Eco's latest novel concerns Yambo, a 60-something amnesiac book dealer in Milan who retreats to his childhood home to pour over memorabilia in an attempt to find his lost memories.
When aging Italian book-dealer Yambo, hero of this engaging if somewhat bloodless novel of ideas, regains consciousness after a mysterious coma, he suffers a peculiar form of amnesia. His "public" memory of languages, everyday routines, history and literature remains intact, but his autobiographical memory of personal experiences – of his family, lovers, childhood, even his name – is gone. He can spout literary and cultural allusions on any topic, citing everything from Moby-Dick to Star Trek, but complains, "I don't have feelings, I only have memorable sayings".
To recover his past, he repairs to his boyhood home to peruse a cache of memorabilia amassed in his youth during Mussolini's power and WWII, consisting of comic books, schoolbooks, Fascist propaganda, popular music, romantic novels and his own poetry about an unattainable high school beauty.
The setup allows semiotician and novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose, etc.) to indulge his passion for pulp materials by reproducing such objects as movie posters, song lyrics and a graphic novella rendering

To Kill a Mockingbird
is a Southern Gothic bildungsroman novel by Harper Lee. Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The novel is loosely based on the lives of various friends and members of the author's family, but with differing character names. Lee has acknowledged that the character Jean Louise "Scout" Finch, who serves as the novel's narrator, is somewhat based on herself.

To Kill a Mockingbird contains many themes such as selfishness, hatred, courage, pride, prejudice, and life's many stages, set against a backdrop of life in the Deep South. The book was successfully adapted for film by director Robert Mulligan with a screenplay by Horton Foote in 1962. To date, it is Lee's only published novel.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History
279 pages
For all those who slept through class, Alan Axelrod has a gift for bringing history to life.
Included are all the "main events", plus little known facts and fascinating characters.
With wit, wisdom and insight, Axelrod puts history in perspective and makes it fun, engrossing and memorable.