 | The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
Buy new: £6.74 / Used from: £4.25 Rip-roaring tale of girls, parties and nucleotides. Watson's views about women are weird, but he tells a great story and he is after all a genius
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 | Mathematics: The New Golden Age (Penguin Science) by Keith J. Devlin
Buy new: £9.09 / Used from: £6.99 All that's happening in contemporary maths, made understandable
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 | The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
Buy new: £3.77 / Used from: £4.54 Extremely readable and also a serious contribution to science
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 | Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Penguin Classics) by Albert Einstein
Buy used from: £3.37 You may as well have it explained to you by the chairman of the board
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 | Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements by John Emsley
Buy new: £7.79 / Used from: £5.20 What the elements are and what they do. Hours of fascinating browsing
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 | The Character of Physical Law (Penguin Press Science) by Richard P. Feynman
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £2.42 Feynman at his most engaging, talking for the general public about why stuff happens
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 | The Principles of Psychology: Volume 1 by William James
Buy new: £7.56 / Used from: £2.84 Once a standard textbook, now chiefly just a great read, but he's a lot more lucid than his brother Henry. Don't forget volume 2
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 | The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: "The Interpretaion of Dreams", Pt.1 v. 4 by Sigmund Freud
Buy new: £8.39 / Used from: £6.43 I don't know if psychoanalysis is exactly a science, but this is still fascinating. Again, you'll need volume 2
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 | On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky
Buy new: £10.08 / Used from: £4.79 Some of the most recent thoughts of the man who practically invented modern linguistics. He's changed his mind a lot so keep an eye out for updates
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 | The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin Press Science) by Steven Pinker
Buy new: £6.49 / Used from: £3.25 Much of the best work of Pinker. A valuable counter-argument to fashionable pseudoscience, but he does go wildly astray when he starts talking about art
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 | The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (English Library) by Charles Darwin
Buy new: £3.03 / Used from: £1.59 Endlessly interesting and very lucid
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