One that I read many years ago, when I was an undergrad, called The Glass Bead Game, by Hermann Hesse. I think it was very influential for deciding to get into academia... it's a very strange view of academia though.

Here is a relevant description from Wikipedia.

The setting is a fictional province of central Europe called Castalia, which was reserved by political decision for the life of the mind; technology and economic life are kept to a strict minimum. Castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals with a twofold mission: to run boarding schools for boys, and to nurture and play the Glass Bead Game, whose exact nature remains elusive and whose devotees occupy a special school within Castalia known as Waldzell. The rules of the game are only alluded to—they are so sophisticated that they are not easy to imagine. Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history. The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences. It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics.

The Foundation Trilogy and War and Peace were both very influential in me getting into Social Psychology, perhaps even more than studying the thing. It's like literature gives a nice background for my motivations and intuitions about the field, and the rest is just technical stuff.