What topics and books should a person read who has interest in creating cognitive intelligence in computers?

Check out the OpenCog Foundation at http://opencog.org ..

Ben Goertzel and Hugo de Garis are real characters ..

See their:

A world survey of artificial brain projects Part I: Large-scale brain simulations (2010)

and

World survey of artificial brains, Part II: Biologically inspired cognitive architectures (2010)