Cosmos made me feel small in the best way

Some of the science has moved on since 1980, but that's not why you read it. You read it for Sagan's way of making you care. He tells you how Eratosthenes worked out the size of the Earth using shadows and a bit of geometry, and suddenly a very old calculation feels thrilling.

He also keeps coming back to how fragile all of this is: knowledge, libraries, life on one small planet. For a popular science book, it's surprisingly moving. Read it at night if you can, and then go up to the roof, power cuts permitted.