Imagining Numbers: a recommendation

OK, you are desperate to read a good math book, but you don't want to do any heavy duty math. You are in luck. Barry Mazur meditates on imagination, art, and mathematics in his charming Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen).

As he says in the preface:

This book began as a letter to my friend Michel Chaouli. The two of us had been musing about whether or not one could "feel" the workings of the imagination in its various labors.

The only math background you need is knowing how to multiply and recalling from high school algebra that X is the unknown quantity.

From the back cover of the book:

Barry Mazur invites lovers of poetry to make a leap into mathematics. Through discussions of the role of the imagination and imagery in both poetry and mathematics. Mazur reviews the writings of the early mathematical explorers and reveals the bafflement of these Renaissance thinkers faced with imaginary numbers. Then he shows us, step-by-step, how to begin imagining these strange mathematical objects ourselves.