Good book for non school reading?

[rollcast]

I have £25 or $40 worth of book tokens to spend. I normally don't read fiction books and was thinking of getting a scientific or engineering orientated book that I could read without having a degree in the relevant subject?

I like electronics and physics and had though about either getting The Emperors New Mind or the biography of Alan Turing?

Anyone else got any suggestions?

Thanks
AL

 

[micromass]

The Feynman lectures??

 

[20Tauri]

Which Turing bio are you looking at? I've been hoping to find a good one.

If you're looking for a pop sci kind of book, Fermat's Enigma is really well-written and doesn't assume a lot of math background. It gives you a pretty good view of math history in the course of following those who attempted to (and Andrew Wiles, who did) solve Fermat's Last Theorem.

I recently read Janna Levin's How the Universe Got Its Spots which is about the size and shape of the universe. I thought it was pretty interesting, but I've taken a lot of math and I still found it tough...she gets into topology and stuff like that. Also, I know very little about physics and so I can't comment as to how accurate it is.