r/askscience · 2021

Most-mentioned books in r/askscience during 2021

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/askscience within the published source unit for 2021. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2021

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

7 in 2021

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.

6 in 2021

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.

4 in 2021

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.

4 in 2021

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.

3 in 2021

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?

2 in 2021

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.

2 in 2021

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.

2 in 2021

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.

1 in 2021

#10

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.

1 in 2021

#11

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 2021

#12

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 2021

#13

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.

1 in 2021

#14

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.

1 in 2021