Basic AI reading
My two favorite AI books:
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker
The best basic theory I've found about how the brain works. In a nutshell, Pinker argues for a relatively large number of specialized modules, each optimized for solving particular kinds of problems. There's nothing revolutionary in this book, but it's an excellent synthesis of much current thought on the topic.
On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins
Unlike Pinker, I think Hawkins is wrong about a lot of things, including the value of trying to exactly replicate human cognition, and the functional uniformity of the cortex. Nonetheless, he makes an excellent and interesting case for pattern matching playing a central role in human intelligence.