Reddit mentions of The Earwig's Tail: A Modern Bestiary of Multi-legged Legends

Full disclosure: I'm biased towards organismal biology, natural history, and entomology...


Field guides! Any field guides you can get a hold of!
The Origin of the Species, of course (and probably your best bet is James Costa's The Annotated Origin, since it has lots of clarifications, updates, and interesting side notes throughout the entire book. If you're into historical naturalists, he recently released one of Alfred Russel Wallace's field notebooks with a similar treatment (On the Organic Law of Change))
May Berenbaum has a few interesting books full of short chapters about various insect myths/legends/neat-stuff. An Earwig's Tail is probably the best one.
There are many popular books on evolution that might interest the more die-hard students, like Why Evolution is True (Jerry Coyne), Your Inner Fish (Neil Shubin), and Dawkins' books from before he put atheism in front of biology.

Go to used bookstores and browse their selections. You can get lots of nice books for pretty cheap. My partner was a high school biology teacher, and could probably fill a bookshelf with second-hand science books. Lots of good stuff, loaded with photos, to just flip through.


DVDs are a nice addition to a bookshelf, too! David Attenborough's nature documentaries are all excellent, Sagan's Cosmos is a must (also a few of his books!), etc.