r/askscience · 2021
Top books in r/askscience during 2021
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2021. Useful for spotting what r/askscience was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee
Siddhartha Mukherjee traces cancer from ancient papyrus to targeted therapy, framing it as a 4,000-year war medicine is still losing on some fronts.
#2 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.
#3 Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
John D. Clark
A rocket chemist's irreverent account of the people who spent the Cold War blowing things up in pursuit of the perfect propellant.
#4 On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin
Darwin lays out natural selection with no genes, no genetics lab, and enough observational evidence to strand every subsequent counter-argument.
#5 A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking explains black holes, the Big Bang, and the edge of time to people who never took a physics class.
#6 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?
#7 Immune: A Journey into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive
Philipp Dettmer
Philipp Dettmer of Kurzgesagt turns the immune system into a 300-page illustrated war story, written for the person who watched every YouTube video and still wanted more.
#8 The Double Helix
James D. Watson
The story behind the story of DNA: Watson and Crick's race to the double helix, including the part where they used Rosalind Franklin's data without her knowledge.
#9 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
A Black woman's cancer cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951, then used in nearly every major biomedical breakthrough for decades while her family knew nothing.
#10 What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions
Randall Munroe
Randall Munroe takes absurd physics questions — what if a baseball traveled at 90% the speed of light? — and answers them with actual math.
#11 Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Neil Shubin
A paleontologist finds a fish fossil in the Arctic and uses it to trace the evolutionary origin of your hands, ears, and hernias.