r/askscience · 2022
Top books in r/askscience during 2022
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2022. Useful for spotting what r/askscience was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#6 A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson traces how scientists figured out the age of the Earth, the size of the atom, and nearly everything else — told through the humans who got it wrong first.
#7 Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard P. Feynman
A Nobel physicist narrates his own life as a sequence of pranks, safecracks, bongo sessions, and accidental discoveries — none of which he takes more seriously than the others.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.