A growing list of books that I and some other think are well-written. It started when I asked on Twitter which books people like for clarity and prose; many generously shared their favorites. As the Twitter thread quickly became a maze, I collected them here and, if available, added links to Open Library—where you can borrow and read quite a few of them for free!
A helpful video by Meghan Adrian on how Open Library works and how you can browse and, if available, borrow books.
- Petit Point by de Gennes
- Stages to Saturn by Roger E Bilstein
- The Self-Made Tapestry by Philip Ball
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- Advice to a Young Scientist by Peter Medawar
- My family and other animals by Gerald Durrell
- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
- Physics Can Be Fun by Y. Perelman
- Chaos by James Gleick
- The flying circus of physics by Jearl Walker
- Random Walks in Biology by Howard Berg
- What light through yonder window breaks? by Craig F. Bohren
- Clouds in a glass of beer by Craig F. Bohren
- Beam The Race to Make the Laser by Jeff Hecht
- One, Two, Three... Infinity by G. Gamow
- The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
- The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing by Richard Dawkins
- Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life by Leonard Mlodinow
- Aristotle to Zoos: A Philosophical Dictionary of Biology by P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar
- Patterns in nature why the natural world looks the way it does by Philip Ball
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis
- On the origin of species by means of natural selection by Charles Darwin
- Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations by Werner Heisenberg
- A cultural history of physics by Károly Simonyi
- Hidden Wonders: The Subtle Dialogue Between Physics and Elegance by E. Guyon, J. Bico, E. Reyssat, and B. Roman
- The Way of the Cell: Molecules, Organisms, and the Order of Life by Franklin M. Harold
- Boojums All the Way through: Communicating Science in a Prosaic Age by N. David Mermin
- Memories of a Theoretical Physicis; Joseph Polchinski; arXiv (2017)
- Book was there: reading in electronic times by Andrew Piper
- Enrico Fermi Physicist by Emilio Segre
- Madame Curie: A Biography By Eve Curie
- I Want to be a Mathematician by Paul Halmos
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman
- Niels Bohs: gentle genius of Denmark by Ray Spangenburg
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Feynman and Leighton
- Singularly Unfeminine Profession, A: One Woman’s Journey in Physics by Mary K. Gaillard
- What little I remember by O. R. Frisch
- Adventures of a mathematician by S. M. Ulam
- Littlewood's Miscellany by J. E. Littlewood
- A Walk Through Combinatorics by Miklós Bóna
- Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science by Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik
- Modelling dynamic phenomena in molecular and cellular biology by Lee Segel
- Electricity and Magnetism by Edward Purcell
- Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by S. H. Strogatz
- Molecular biophysics by M. V. Volkenshtein
- Biophysics by Walter Hoppe, Wolfgang Lohmann, Hubert Markl, Hubert Ziegler
- Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems by G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine
- Thermodynamic theory of structure, stability and fluctuations by P. Glansdorff and I. Prigogine
- Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics by Frederick Reif
- Introduction to modern statistical mechanics by David Chandler
- Computer Simulation of Liquids by M. P. Allen and D. J. Tildesley
- Protein physics by Finkelstein and Ptitsyn
- Ionic Solution Theory by H. Friedman and I. Prigogine
- Theory of the stability of lyophobic colloids by Verwey and Overbeek
- Feynman's thesis by R. P. Feynman
- Quantum mechanics and path integrals by R. P. Feynman
- Cell Biology by the Numbers by Ron Milo and Rob Phillips
- Quantum Computation and Quantum Information by Michael A. Nielsen and Isaac L. Chuang
- Quantum Computation Lecture Notes (Caltech CS219) by John Preskill