I was a voracious reader of programming books prior to reading Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built." However, it was this book that made me (finally) realize that some of the best programming books are not about programming at all. As a result I've cut back drastically on my "language-specific" programming books[1] and have sought programming-relevant books instead.

[1]: And I've made it a personal goal to limit the "language-specific" books to those written before 1995.