r/askscience · 2019

Most-mentioned books in r/askscience during 2019

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/askscience within the published source unit for 2019. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2019

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.

7 in 2019

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.

4 in 2019

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.

3 in 2019

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.

2 in 2019

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.

2 in 2019

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.

2 in 2019

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.

2 in 2019

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?

1 in 2019

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.

1 in 2019

#10

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.

1 in 2019

#11

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.

1 in 2019

#12

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.

1 in 2019

#13

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.

1 in 2019

#14

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.

1 in 2019