r/askscience · 2025
Top books in r/askscience during 2025
Ranked by mentions in r/askscience threads dated 2025. 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 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 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.
#4 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.
#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 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 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 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 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.