[boris]

The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene. Then I have all those gigantic tomes by Neal Stephenson on the stack. I was hooked by The Cryptonomicon. Plus the Da Vinci Code (read Angels and Demons) and:

Fluke : Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings by Christopher Moore;
The Mathematical Universe, by William Dunham;
Euler, the Master of Us All, by William Dunham;
Human Accomplishment, by Charles Murray;
Prime Obsession, by John Derbyshire;
The Nobel Prize, by Burton Feldman;
Remarkable Mathematicians, by Joan James;
Korolev, by James Harford;
e, the Story of a Number, by Eli Maor;
The Discovery of Dynamics, by Julian Barbour (I didn't understand his other book either);
The Golden Ratio, by Mario Livio

...among others.

I generally take a break by reading some Jack Vance or re-reading some of Lord Dunsany [whose prose has never been equalled by anybody.

--Boris

[dr_pat]

Thanks for the referral to e, The Story of a Number, which I had not run into yet. I'll have to dig it up!

I'm assuming that the previous BBB (baffling book of Barbour's) was The End of Time. That is one of those books that gives you the quite spurious feeling that you have understood something really esoteric. Then you try to put it together with concepts for which you DO have a solid grasp, and you realize it was a slipperier concept than you thought.

I blog books, including Fluke and The Crytonomicon.