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by evanb 3251 days ago
I broke up my list into cultural (that is, about the people, history, etc), popular (that is, not aimed at a student or an expert), and texts.

CULTURAL

Einstein - Essays in Humanism

Frayn - Copenhagen

Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think?

de Grasse Tyson - Death by Black Hole

Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Kaiser - Drawing Theories Apart

Kaiser - How the Hippied Saved Physics

Macaulay - The Way Things Work

Paulos - Innumeracy

Sagan - Cosmos

Sagan - Broca's Brain

Sagan - The Demon-Haunted World

Salam - Science in the Third World

Seife - Zero

Weisskopf - The Joy of Insight

POPULAR

Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity (especially his explanation about fungibility in quantum mechanics)

Feynman - The Meaning of It All

Feynman - Lectures on Physics

Feynman and Weinberg - Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics

Galison - Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps

Gamow - One, Two, Three... Infinity

Hadamard - Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

Hawking - A Brief History of Time

Hofstadter - Gödel Escher Bach

Heisenberg - Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

Polya - How to Solve It

Schrödinger - What is Life?

Susskind - The Theoretical Minimum

Susskind - Quantum Mechanics

Wallace - Everything And More

Weinberg - The First Three Minutes

Wiener - God & Golem, Inc.

TEXTS

Aaronson - Quantum Computing with Democritus (but I don't have a version with me in the acknowledgements https://books.google.com/books?id=jRGfhSoFx0oC&lpg=PR31&ots=... )

Abelson and Sussman - SICP

Abrikosov, Gorkov, and Dzyaloshinski - Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics

Cohen-Tannoudji - Quantum Mechanics (1+2)

Dirac - Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Eddington - Space, Time, and Gravitation

Feynman - Feynman's Thesis

Feynman and Hibbs - Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals

Fermi - Thermodynamics

Gattringer & Lang - Quantum Chromodynamics on the Lattice

Goldstein - Classical Mechanics (the old version, NOT with Poole and Safko)

Griffiths - Introduction to Electrodynamics

Griffiths - Introduction to Quantum Mechanics

Jackson - Classical Electrodynamics (2nd edition---the last one entirely in CGS---is preferable)

Kleppner and Kolenkow - An Introduction to Mechanics

Landau and Lifshitz - any book in this series

Nielsen and Chuang - Quantum Computation and Quantum Information

Pauli - Selected Topics in Field Quantization

Peskin & Schroeder - An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory

Purcell - Electricity and Magnetism

Ryden - Introduction to Cosmology

Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (up to chapter 5, after which Sakurai dies and the editors put his notes together)

Sussman and Wisdom - Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics

Sipser - Introduction to the Theory of Computation

Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps

Thouless - The Quantum Mechanics of Many-Body Systems

Weinberg - The Quantum Theory of Fields I, II, and III

Zee - Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell