r/askscience · 2022

Most-mentioned books in r/askscience during 2022

This page ranks books by exact tracked mentions in r/askscience within the published source unit for 2022. Counts come from the reconciled subreddit-by-month matrix; a source unit may be a bounded sample.

Books ranked

Tracked mentions in 2022

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

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.

6 in 2022

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.

6 in 2022

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.

4 in 2022

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 2022

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.

3 in 2022

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 2022

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 2022

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.

2 in 2022

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.

2 in 2022

#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.

2 in 2022

#11

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.

2 in 2022

#12

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.

1 in 2022

#13

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 2022

#14

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 2022

#15

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 2022