In reply to crossdressingrodney:
The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch is a fantastically deep book by a wonderful physicist and very original thinker. Not many numbers, but plenty of profound mathematical ideas.
Metamagical Themas, also by Doug Hofstadter, might interest you more than his other books (if you weren't into the cognitive side of GEB), although it's not nearly so epic. James Gleick's 'Chaos' is getting on a bit, but a fantastic presentation of a fascinating period. His biography of Feynman, 'Genius', is great too, as is The Information.
On a more purely physics front, I can also recommend John Barrow's books, and Lee Smolin if you're feeling speculative (Life of the Cosmos, for starters) - both on the cosmological side of physics, plenty on thermodynamics, less of QED, QCD and nuclear physics. Smolin has some interesting ideas on quantum gravity too, presented in other books, and gets deep into the mathematics, albeit in a largely equation free way.
In the end, though, GEB is something of a one-off. Try to get used to that idea.
Post edited at 02:05