The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

I was curious about his other work after reading Farenheit 451.  Bradbury seems to be quite good at the craft of writing.
The premise of this books, with stories embedded in animated tatoos on a man who lives as a social outcast, is brilliant.  At the beginning of the book, Bradbury exploits it well but it deteriorates into a loose framework for binding together a collection of disparate short stories - many of which are quite short.
Some of the short stories are interestingly bizarre in themselves.  Many of them blend a bizarre mix of science fiction and 1950s American T.V. culture à la "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver".
Entertaining reading but not gripping enough to wade through in one go.

Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution - Neil deGrasse Tyson/ Donald Goldsmith

An easy book to read about a complex subject.  Very well-divided into chapters that focus on particular questions or issues around origins:  the universe, galaxies, stars, planets, life.  There are also a couple of chapters on the possibility and the search for life elsewhere in the universe.  He also includes an interesting chapter on matter and antimatter, and dark matter and energy.  You get a sense of the big pictures and also the ongoing unresolved questions or issues in this domaine.

Lots of interesting facts to pick up:

Living things are made largely of the most common elements in the universe, which differ completely from the most common elements on earth.  This is considered one possible argument for life beginning outside earth and being "seeded" here, but is by no means a final argument.

A great explanation of how stars create those most common elements in the universe through fusion of progressively more complex molecules, up to iron.  Once you hit iron, more energy is consumed in the fusion than is produced, leading to a collapse of the star, a huge rise in temperatures and a final explosive fusion as the star blows itself up.  In this last fusion all the other elements are created, but in much smaller amounts than iron and the preceding other elements.