The life of a leaf

What a fun book. Steven Vogel has a great voice - it's like having your fun, very smart uncle sit you down and open your mind to a bunch of science that applies to plants. Everything is built up from common intuition about shapes and our everyday experience, so it's quite accessible. He also has the actual equations floating around in the footnotes for the more quantitatively minded. I learned a bunch of fun facts, but more importantly it opened my eyes to a new way of thinking about things in nature.

Mostly the physics of leaves, not their molecular biology. I learned many interesting things - that you can float using a wet pillow-case, but not a dry one, why your gas mileage goes down so quickly with increased speed, and a review of the peculiarities of water (the way it adheres to itself, the way its density changes with temperature) that permits life as we know it. Also, why you have to use a dish cloth when you clean dishes; the velocity of a viscous fluid at the luminal surface is zero.