List of book recommendations For the reasons explained here, can you recommend one or more books about Buddhism?


I suggest a format like,


  Title of Book by Name of Author
  
  A summary of what's in the book, recommended for these reasons.

One book per answer (but multiple answers, a different book for each answer, is welcome)
Books -- but not videos -- i.e. readable; published in print, and/or online
I think it's more important to mention why you recommend a book, and less important to summarise what's in it




Unlike most other topics on this site, this topic is Community Wiki.

If it's a good introductory book then post it here instead -- Introductory books to Buddhism -- and use this topic for other (non-Introductory) books about any more-specific topics.
"In the Buddha's Words" by Bhikkhu Bodhi. The PDF version of it can be downloaded here.

It is an anthology or selection of translated suttas from the Pali Canon. It is also thematically and systematically arranged.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who finds the Sutta Pitaka too huge and difficult to traverse. Bhikkhu Bodhi is one of the foremost translators and scholars of the Pali Canon. He also created this 512-page anthology arranged in a systematic manner, for the benefit of Pali Canon students everywhere.

I quote from the Preface:


  In an ongoing series of lectures I began giving at Bodhi Monastery in
  New Jersey in January 2003, I devised a scheme of my own to organize
  the contents of the Majjhima Nikaya. This scheme unfolds the Buddha's
  message progressively, from the simple to the difficult, from the
  elementary to the profound. Upon reflection, I saw that this scheme
  could be applied not only to the Majjhima Nikaya, but to the four
  Nikayas as a whole. The present book organizes suttas selected from
  all four Nikayas within this thematic and progressive framework.
  
  This book is intended for two types of readers. The first are those
  not yet acquainted with the Buddha's discourses who feel the need for
  a systematic introduction. For such readers, any of the Nikayas is
  bound to appear opaque. All four of them, viewed at once, may seem
  like a jungle—entangling and bewildering, full of unknown beasts—or
  like the great ocean—vast, tumultuous, and forbidding. I hope that
  this book will serve as a map to help them wend their way through the
  jungle of the suttas or as a sturdy ship to carry them across the
  ocean of the Dhamma.
  
  The second type of readers  for whom this book is meant are those, 
  already acquainted with the suttas, who still cannot see how they fit
  together into an intelligible whole. For such readers, individual
  suttas may be comprehensible in themselves, but the  texts in their
  totality appear like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle scattered across a
  table. Once one understands the scheme in this book, one should come
  away with a clear idea of the architecture of the teaching. Then, with
  a little reflection,  one should be able to determine the place any
  sutta occupies in the edifice of the Dhamma, whether or not it has
  been included in this anthology.