The Gene

Brilliant! It's style of slowly teaching you about genetics as it guides you through the history of the discoveries of genetics helps understand the gene better.

There are so many characters along the way, each one toiling for years on some tiny area of expertise they couldn't even be sure was a good idea or worth collecting data on. Like Thomas Morgan, meticulously cross breeding fruit flies and recording results for five years just to see if he can learn anything. If that doesn't inspire you, I don't know what will.

And also, find someone who talks about you the way Siddhartha Mukherjee writes about the DNA double helix.