Others have mentioned "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott, which I also strongly recommend.
"Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension" by Rudolf Rucker should be accessible to a high school student. It revisits Flatland, so that's probably a good book to read first.
"The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" by Leonard Mlodinow is an easy and entertaining read, and talks about how human intuition is often wrong when making probability estimates.
"Knotted Doughnuts" by Martin Gardner is a compilation of brain-teasers from Scientific American. Gardner has published several of these collections, but this is my favorite.
Dvorak is optimized for writing English. Most coders - like most computer users in general - do not use English as their main language, and for us Dvorak is substantially worse than the qwerty layout in every way.
Most (not all) computer languages have keywords and library names and functions that ARE based on English. Furthermore, English is the most common language used in comments when contributors have different native languages. So, coders type an awful lot of English and near-English words. So, I dispute your assertion about English not being used by most coders.
Furthermore, I don't see why Dvorak is a horrible layout for other languages. I type a few other European languages with some regularity on a Dvorak keyboard, and while accents are a bit of a pain, it's no worse than qwerty. Qwerty is essentially random, so it's certainly not tuned for any particular language, except perhaps by accident. I can't say whether qwerty's really good for some non-European languages, but I doubt that it's substantially better than Dvorak.
If you ignore the letter keys, the only things that are moved so that greater or less reach is required are: -_ swapped with [{ , and += swapped with ]} . Whether this is good or bad depends on your coding style and what programming languages you use.
Long story short: you're a moron.
I've been using Dvorak for 10 years. It took me a couple of days to learn, and I exceeded my qwerty typing speed within two months. Almost all of what I type is code. I'm happy with the switch.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken