A great book about Buddhism, or at least about the search — Hesse was a German novelist, not a monk, and I don't treat it as doctrine. A friend lent it before I moved to China; I read it in short bursts on the Shanghai metro.
Siddhartha meets the Buddha, admires him, walks away because enlightenment can't be handed over like lecture notes. Merchants, Kamala, disgust, the river. The river section is the part that lingered — wisdom as something you live, not download.
It nudged my own stop-start practice without preaching. Still in my bag for now.