Start with one volume
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt · Toby Wilkinson (2010)
Three thousand years told as a political story, with the pharaonic state treated as a state: taxation, propaganda, force, and the machinery that kept a narrow river valley governed for longer than anyone has managed since. Wilkinson is notably unsentimental about the pyramids, which is refreshing after a lifetime of documentaries.
A History of Ancient Egypt · John Romer (2012, and a second volume in 2016)
The slower, stranger alternative, built from the material evidence upward and openly suspicious of the tidy dynastic narrative everyone else repeats. Romer keeps asking how we actually know things, which makes him harder work and more honest. Take Wilkinson first if you want the story, Romer if you want the argument.
Then go wider
The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt · edited by Ian Shaw (2000)
The reference shelf in one book, chapter by period, each by a specialist. Not a cover-to-cover read and the best thing to own once you want to check something. The chronology alone justifies it.
Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization · Barry Kemp (1989, revised since)
How the society actually worked: settlement, economy, ideology, the physical logic of a state strung along a river. More demanding than the narrative histories and the book that changes how you read them.
Then the gods and the dead
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt · Richard H. Wilkinson (2003)
Every significant deity, illustrated, with the iconography explained rather than just described. Egyptian religion is genuinely difficult, gods merging and splitting across millennia, and this is the book that makes it navigable.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead · translated by Raymond Faulkner
Not a book and not about death, exactly: a working collection of spells for getting through the afterlife's bureaucracy, copied to order for people who could afford it. Faulkner's translation with the Papyrus of Ani reproduced is the standard edition. Strange, repetitive, and unlike anything else that survives from the ancient world.
Fitting Egypt into a real life
The pattern with Egypt is a burst of enthusiasm followed by a stall around the Second Intermediate Period. Daily portions hold better. 365 Days of Mythology (ours, flagged) runs a myth a day across thirty-plus pantheons with Egypt in heavy rotation, and 365 Days of World History keeps the chronology moving. Our Egyptian mythology primer is the companion to this page, and Greek history picks up where the Ptolemies arrive.
Common questions
What is the best book on ancient Egypt for beginners?
Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. One volume, three thousand years, and it treats Egypt as a state rather than a mystery.
What is the difference between Egyptian history and Egyptian mythology?
History is the dynasties, the administration and the archaeology; mythology is Osiris, Isis and the solar barque. Egyptian religion was state policy, so the two overlap more than they do in Greece.
Is the Book of the Dead worth reading?
Yes, but as a curiosity rather than a narrative. It is a spell collection for the afterlife, repetitive by design. Faulkner's translation with the Papyrus of Ani is the edition to get.
Do I need a book on hieroglyphs?
Not to read the history. If you catch the bug, Mark Collier and Bill Manley's How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs is the standard self-teaching book.