The o.p. doesn’t note the areas of physics about which he is interested. The ‘sexy’ stuff (today) is in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but the problem with reading popular books on the topic is that many authors–even respected physicists–don’t clearly distinguish between accepted theory and unsubstantiated hypothesis, especially when it comes to highly speculative areas such as M-theory/superstring theory or interpretations of quantum mechanics. It is also basically impossible for someone not educated in physics to distinguish between validated theory, reasonable speculation, and errant noodling when it comes to quantum mechanics. I think it is good to first gain at least a good conceptual grounding in the basics of both classical and modern physics before trying to read on metaphysical interpretations. To that end, Leonard Susskind’s The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics and (though I haven’t yet read it) his Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum will help a non-specialist get up to speed with the least amount of pain in understanding the basic concepts from mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, and basic quantum theory. They don’t entirely meet the o.p.'s criteria of avoiding equations but the math that is presented is reasonable simple and explained conceptually, versus standard textbooks that follow the “calculation is explanation” pedagogy. Jim Al-Khalili’s Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed is also a fantastic book for the layman on quantum mechanics which provides simple (insofar as possible) explanations of quantum mechanical phenomena which demystify the supposed paradoxes, and as a bonus, has really beautiful illustrations. Feynman is good as well, but realize that his eponymous Lectures were notes from his three quarters of lectures to Caltech undergrads; as such, they start from the basics and build with the kind of practical demonstrations he loved to use for illustration but are fairly dense. There are also a small number of errors (none significant in a conceptual fashion).
Once you’ve gotten past that, you might consider reading on the history of physics to get some notion for how the field has evolved, and thus, why certain bits of nomenclature or concepts are the way they are. This is something most physics students (even at the graduate level) have only a cursory exposure to, which is unfortunate because there is a lot of insight to be had into why certain ideas and terms have stuck despite giving a completely wrong impression to the uninitiated, e.g. the supposed paradox of particle-wave duality. There are many, many great books about the history of physics and major personalities associated with it, but George Gamow’s Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Qnatum Theory is probably the best explanation for this particular area which has led to a lot of the metaphysical discussion owing to its completely non-intuitive and apparently stochastic nature. Gamow’s book is quite old and available in an inexpensive Dover edition, but covers the development of quantum theory up to Yukawa and Fermi.
Beyond that, and you start getting into quantum field theory, which is the basic modern theory of quantum mechanics; the typical reference is Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, which gives a very general conception of quantum electrodynamics (the relativistic theory of electron-photon exchange that governs all chemical-type behavior) but the manner illustrated in the book isn’t they way physicists really think about or use QED models, and I find it of limited utility. I’m still working my way through Quantum Field Theory for the Gifted Amateur by Lancaster and Blundell; it will definitely violate your “minimal equations” rule, but there is enough explanation that you can probably get the general concepts out of it. I also like Tony Zee’s Quantum Mechanics in a Nutshell, but it is intended as a text for upper division undergraduate or introductory graduate courses and so it delves heavily into the mathematics, which is unavoidable if you actually need to work problems.
On the relativity front there are a large number of good books that illustrate the basic principles, but I think it is best to start with the source and read Einstein’s Relativity: The Special and General Theory first. It’s a translation but done by Einstein himself, and its less than a hundred pages. There are books with better illustrations, and if you really want to understand general relativity the math is unavoidable, but special relativity is fully accessible to anyone with basic algebra and a willingness to accept that nature behaves in ways that seem to violate intuition when you approach the speed of light, and that time and space are part and parcel of the same cloth.
Once you get through most of that, you can start on the metaphysics with sufficient grounding to separate the wheat from the chaff (or at least know when someone is speculating versus talking from validated theory). I’ve been reading Alyssa Ney’s and David Albert’s compiliation The Wave Function: Essays on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics occasionally, which discusses current thinking about the nature of quantum mechanics and the ontology and limitations of the ‘wave function’ approach. It draws no conclusions (as there is not sufficient distinction between interpretations to reach such) but offers some interesting discussion that won’t be found in any textbook on physics. I also enjoy David Bohm’s writing, but you have to be very careful to separate is explantion from speculation, especially when he starts talking about “implicate and explicate orders”. In the end, you have to bear in mind that pretty much anything we can say about quantum mechanics that responds to the question of “How?” or “Why?” is purely speculative.
Stranger