WW, as you request,

The Flanders Panel.
Fiction. Mystery. Been a while since I read it, but here goes. These are two mysteries, an ancient one and a modern one, that are connected via another mystery in a painting. http://www.geocities.com/elbillaf/read_005.html

How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker.
Nonfiction. (The author's The Language Instinct is also on my list, but I probably wont get to it for at least a few years.) HTMW is reminiscent of Minsky's Society of Mind. The brain is not a single program, but a collection of (sometimes independent, and sometimes interactive) parallel agents. It's not a "general purpose computer" as it is commonly portrayed, but a very special purpose computer - and that's why it's so easy to fool. (autostereograms, picture puzzles, etc.)

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.
Historical fiction, science fiction (but not too far out scifi, really). Now my favorite book. Weaves an historical story from the world war 2 era involving a no-nonsense marine and a mathematical genius and codebreaker, in with a modern story about the decendents of those characters. This is Neal Stephenson's best book to date. (I haven't read Zodiac, so maybe it's better.)
The best thing is that while I think he's grasping a bit at the end, he doesn't completely ruin a great story as he did in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age.

k