Ed Erwin's Reviews > Atom Land: A Guided Tour Through the Strange and Impossibly Small World of Particle Physics

A quick, entertaining read. Tough going for me in the beginning, because it was covering stuff I know very well already and doing so inside an annoying (to me) story of traveling between different islands representing different classes of subatomic particles. Maps of those islands, reminiscent of those in A Wizard of Earthsea and similar fantasy stories were attractive, but added little for me. The book really started to become interesting to me only when it started discussing the weak nuclear force, which I've studied much less than other ideas in physics. Near the end, there are a few short chapters on more speculative theories (super-symmetry, string theories, etc.) going beyond the standard model that are treated here with appropriate skepticism, but not outright dismissal.