The Strand in NYC, the only brick-and-mortar bookstore I still go to regularly, asked Oliver Sacks to create a shelf of his favorite titles. Below are the first ten. (The Weisman book is a particular favorite of mine.) See the whole list here.

• The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

• The World Without Us by Alan Weisman

• Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World by Abraham Pais

• Music, Language, and the Brainby Aniruddh D. Patel

• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness by Antonio Damasio

• Challenger & Company: the Complete Adventures of Professor Challenger and His Intrepid Team-The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of Mists, The Disintegration Machine and When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle

• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

• The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s Anatom by Bill Hayes

• Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer
  

• Voyage of the Beagle: Charles Darwin’s Journals of Researches by Charles Darwin