Hawking Comes Clean

There's very little maths in a Brief History of Time, and yet it's somehow really dull. I'm not exactly sure what it is - maybe something to do with his writing style. I've got a book by Roger Penrose and, even though it's full of maths and I don't understand the vast majority, it still manages to capture the imagination and seem exciting in a way that Hawking's book totally failed to do.

I've never read any other book by John Gribbin, but I enjoyed Schroedinger's Kittens. He wrote it as a kinf of sequel to In Search of Schroedinger's Cat, so it assumes a bit mroe knowledge and the general introduction to quantum mechanics is fairly brief, if I remember right. It spends more time talking about the philosophical implications of quantum theory - what is the actual physical reality that our maths describes?; is that knowable or important?; that sort of thing.I think the question the book tries to address can probably best be summed up thusly:"Okay, so I know that it can behave like both a wave and a particle, but what actually is it, really?"