r/askscience · 2024
Top books in r/askscience during 2024
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2024. Useful for spotting what r/askscience was picking up or putting down that year.
#1 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.
#2 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.
#3 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.
#4 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.
#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 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.
#7 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.
#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 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.