– Dmitriy Genzel, Jakob Uszkoreit, Franz Och
Not actually a book proper, but a scientific paper commissioned by Google that I printed out and taped into a small notebook. An unusual intersection between literary craft and computer science, it explored the capability of using Google's translation API and cloud computing cluster to translate prose into metered poetry.
I viewed this as an interesting antidote—or maybe antipode—to the poetic styles which I was struggling with during my university undergraduate, whereby if essentially meaningless writing could be better made by computers rather than by hand, this paper looked towards a method for perfecting the process wholesale.
Mercifully or not, the fully functional version of the algorithm listed here was never made public.