Subreddit

Top books from r/askscience

r/askscience is a moderated Q&A forum where verified scientists and informed enthusiasts answer questions spanning biology, physics, chemistry, and earth sciences.

Updated September 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

Books ranked

191

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

26.0M

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

r/askscience skews toward books that explain science rather than do it — its top recommendation, The Selfish Gene with 17 mentions, is a popular-science argument about evolution, not a genetics textbook. What If? by Randall Munroe (12 mentions) and A Brief History of Time (11 mentions) round out a list that prizes clarity and wit over rigor. The Emperor of All Maladies and Your Inner Fish (10 mentions each) reflect a strong pull toward narrative biology and medicine — a contrast to r/MachineLearning, whose top title is the dense Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning textbook (26 mentions). Almost nothing from the r/askscience list appears in the other comparison subs, which says something about how self-contained science-curious reading is as a taste.

By year

2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

Most-mentioned in r/askscience

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

The Selfish Gene

Richard Dawkins

A biologist argues you're not really driving the car — your genes are, and they've been doing it since before there was a you.

25 in this sub positive

What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

Randall Munroe

A cartoonist answers a stranger's question about dropping an entire thunderstorm as one giant raindrop, then keeps doing that for 300 pages.

18 in this sub positive

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee traces cancer from ancient Egyptian scrolls calling it untreatable to his own oncology ward, and calls the four-thousand-year fight a biography, not a history.

16 in this sub positive

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Neil Shubin

A paleontologist traces the five-fingered human hand back through Tiktaalik to the fins of a 375-million-year-old fish.

16 in this sub positive

On the Origin of Species

Charles Darwin

A naturalist explains how species arise without a designer, backed by decades of finch beaks, barnacles, and pigeon breeders.

14 in this sub positive

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking explains black holes, time, and the universe's beginning without a single equation, for readers who never took physics.

13 in this sub mixed

Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

Philipp Dettmer

Philipp Dettmer, the voice behind Kurzgesagt, explains why your body sets off a full-scale war every time you catch a cold.

13 in this sub positive

Cosmos

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan's 1980 tour of 15 billion years of cosmic history, written for anyone who once looked up and wanted a real answer.

12 in this sub positive

The Double Helix

James D. Watson

James Watson tells the story of discovering DNA's structure in 1953, and treats Rosalind Franklin badly enough on the page that the argument has outlasted the science.

11 in this sub Not scored

#10

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Rebecca Skloot

In 1951 doctors took cancer cells from a poor Black woman without asking her, and those cells are still alive and multiplying in labs around the world today.

10 in this sub positive

#11

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

John D. Clark

John D. Clark spent a career trying to ignite rocket fuel that mostly wanted to explode, corrode, or both, and wrote the funniest history of failing at it.

7 in this sub positive

#12

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson asks how anyone actually knows a mass extinction wasn't caused by an asteroid, and answers it one solved mystery at a time.

6 in this sub positive

#13

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life

Ed Yong

Ed Yong takes the microbiome from lab jargon to something that makes you look at every living thing differently.

6 in this sub positive

#14

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas R. Hofstadter

A Pulitzer-winning tour through Gödel's incompleteness theorem, Bach's fugues, and Escher's impossible loops — all in service of one question: what is consciousness?

5 in this sub positive

#15

The Elegant Universe

Brian Greene

Brian Greene walks you from Newton to superstrings using astronauts, blinking lights, and rubber-sheet gravity — no physics degree required.

4 in this sub positive

#16

The Feynman Lectures on Physics

Richard P. Feynman

Feynman's three-volume lecture series, free online, used to teach Caltech freshmen physics from particles to gravity.

4 in this sub positive

#17

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

A neurologist's case files: patients who lost the ability to recognize faces, bodies, and the right side of the world — and remained fully themselves.

4 in this sub positive

#18

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Richard P. Feynman

A Nobel physicist recounts the anecdotes behind the equations, cracking safes and playing bongos at Los Alamos on his way to explaining what energy actually is.

3 in this sub positive

#19

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Ed Yong

Ed Yong maps the hidden sensory worlds of animals — from the electric fields sharks feel to the ultraviolet colors butterflies see — that exist just outside human perception.

2 in this sub positive

#20

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Robert M. Sapolsky

A neuroscientist traces one punch backward through hormones, childhood, evolution, and culture to explain why anyone throws it at all.

1 in this sub Not scored

#21

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk spent his career arguing trauma changes the nervous system, and r/CPTSD made the book its shared vocabulary for what happened to them.

1 in this sub Not scored

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