[wruza]

The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke.

I also grew up with three full-sized bookcases mostly filled with all sorts of sci-fi and adventures by my granddad. But when I think of a book, this one always comes to mind first.

Unlike other sci-fi I’ve read before it, this novel had this out-of-usual-limits existential mystery and background dread, mostly unresolvable by its very nature and built into the plot almost immediately so that you have to re-realize it, as if you were at a therapist. I’ve read books with galactic wars, dark corners of space, empires, horrors, strange alien encounters, but only this one touched me so deep.

From non-fiction, it was “from basic to assembly” (noname, can’t find it) and few years later some 80386 system programming manual. I remember another book on assembly in between, it was dark blue.