Reddit reviews The Cosmic Perspective (7th Edition)

The Cosmic Perspective is a pretty good introductory text for astronomy.

The most comprehensive text in astrophysics is An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics by Carroll and Ostlie (often referred to as the "big orange book," or BOB for short). This text is much more mathematically involved, but will teach you most anything you might want to know about astrophysics.

If you really want to understand astronomy, then BOB is the way to go, but you'll have to learn calculus and a couple of years of physics to understand some of the concepts. I would suggest starting with The Cosmic Perspective and learning some physics and math if you become interested enough to move on to BOB.

The best bang for your buck, in my opinion, is Abell's Exploration of the Universe. It's dirt cheap (comparatively), and it contains a lot of the basic math you should know. The major concern is that this book is old, and some of its information is very well out of date. However, the basics of the planets and stars haven't changed significantly in, oh, 50 years or so, so this book is a solid introduction.

If you want something a little more up-to-date (and a little pricier), you might want to check out The Cosmic Perspective. My main complaint is that this book has very little mathematical rigor, but its explanations of concepts are rock solid.

If you really want to shoot for the moon (heh), you could pick up copies of Foundations of Astrophysics or An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics. These are NOT 100-level texts, but these two (especially the second) are must-reads in the world of astronomy textbooks.

I highly suggest books by Marcus Chown, such as Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You and What a Wonderful World: One Man's Attempt to Explain the Big Stuff. Those, along with his other books, are written for people who don't have much of a science background, especially the quantum theory one. I haven't read any of his other books but I assume they're equally helpful. He also made a very comprehensive iPad app on the solar system.
There's also the Cosmic Perspective or The Solar System which are more like textbooks but are still good.