r/askscience · 2023
Top books in r/askscience during 2023
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2023. Useful for spotting what r/askscience was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins argues that evolution makes more sense when you stop rooting for the organism and start watching the gene.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#5 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.
#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 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.
#8 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.
#9 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.
#10 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.
#11 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.
#12 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.
#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.
#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.