Reddit reviews Recentering the Universe: The Radical Theories of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton

Einstein I would say wait a little bit, he assumes a pretty decent mathematical background in his readers, so it can get a bit tricky.

Hawking, meh. The man's a genius but he's not good at explaining physics to laypeople imo. His books seem to state things without any indication of how physicists arrived at those conclusions, so they're a bit of a head scratcher for newbies.

I would say DeGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox and Michio Kaku are fairly easy jumping off points, but you'll soon get tired of hearing the same analogies. When that happens, move onto the slightly deeper books of Brian Greene and John Gribbin. Leave authors like Leonard Susskind, Roger Penrose and Max Tegmark until later, they're pretty heavy.

All of the above are pop science/astrophysics books that deal in exciting, puzzling things at the frontier of knowledge. If you're just looking for a grounding in more mundane everyday physics then you can do a lot worse than to take the free math and physics courses over at Khan Academy and then follow them up with the more advanced free ones at The Theoretical Minimum site. If you knuckle down through those you'll be at undergrad level physics by the end of it, which is honestly about as far as you can go with self teaching imo.

I found it useful to learn the history of things too. Understanding how conclusions were drawn makes the crazy-sounding theories much easier to comprehend. Bill Bryson's book "A Short History of Nearly Everything" is a great overview, and you can follow it up with books specific to the different eras of discovery... Recentering the Universe was a good one for the earliest eras of Copernicus and Galileo. James Gleick's Isaac Newton covers the classical mechanics era. Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field takes you the next step. Then you can get onto Einstein and relativity, of which there are a million and one choices. Then onto quantum mechanics, of which there are even more choices... :-)

Hope that helps.