I have not read the Melanie Mitchell book you mentioned, but I've read about half of one of her introductions to genetic algorithms; it was pretty stellar (I only stopped reading it because I invested in an even better, much more recent text on the subject, and have not had time to return to Mitchell's text), and I've heard good things about Mitchell's general intro to complexity.
Any of Stuart Kauffman's books (which I think I've suggested to you before) provide excellent examples of research in the complexity science tradition. Anything that is not the
The Origins of Order will be at once a pretty easy read and also rather thought-provoking and wide-ranging, although not with the intent of summarizing the complexity literature.
At Home in the Universe or
Reinventing the Sacred would be good for your purposes, and Kauffman has the added bonus of being an extremely clear thinker. Reading his work might dispel for you the idea that studying complexity has to mean speaking in frustratingly opaque vagaries.
I've also read maybe half of Murray Gell-Mann's
The Quark and the Jaguar, and it might actually appeal to you more strongly than anything else I could recommend. Gell-Mann, like Kauffman, is an exceptionally clear thinker and author, and he brings to the table the perspective of a Nobel-prize winning physicist. His reach is wider than Kauffman's (although I think not quite as impressive in specific examples of the complexity research he's done), and he actually discusses at some length the discovery of the quark, quantum mechanics, and a whole host of other physics topics that would interest you, too. Gell-Mann was also instrumental in the early development of the
Santa Fe Institute (as discussed by Waldrop in the book mentioned below), which has figured centrally in putting the notion of complexity seriously in the focus of the scientific community.
Another idea: it's rather old now, but my introduction to the subject was Waldrop's
Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. Waldrop provides an informative, broad narrative; his approach was light on rigor and detail, though.
Lastly, if you would like to understand very quickly what is more-or-less meant by a complex system, read Warren Weaver's 1948 essay,
Science and Complexity. It's a fantastic read (imo) - crisp, quick, and pithy. He provides a very general, but quite clear (not vague!) typology of the kinds of problems with which science is faced (through the lens of someone concerned with the complexity of problems). I think you'll find his perspective very insightful; it will probably clarify and reinforce feelings you already have.
edit: Note that none of these books (except maybe the Mitchell one, about which I'm not sure) will give you a very good introduction to
chaos theory; although the two are often used as synonyms, the complexity literature is tremendously different from the chaos theory literature.
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