Since I’ve become professionally immersed in genetics I haven’t read many books on the topics. I read papers. And I do genetics. But back in the day I did enjoy a good book. The standard recommendation would be to read Matt Ridley’s Genome. It’s a bit dated now (it was published around when the Human Genome Project being completed), but I’d still recommend it.
But when in the mid-2000s I dabbled a little bit in the world of worm (C. elegans) genetics I read Andrew Brown’s In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. It’s pretty far from my current concerns and fixations, with more of a focus on developmental processes, but it is pretty cool to read about the race to “map” every cell in C. elegans.
The second book I’d recommend readers of this blog is the late Will Provine’s The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. Modern population genomics is a massive edifice built atop the foundations of the early 20th century fusion of Mendelism and the biometrical heirs of Darwin. Provine outlines how primitive genetics eventually seeded the birth of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis.