News Archive

Once again, we've brought together a couple of lovers of popular science and made them tell us what they loved reading this year. Not all of the books below were released in 2015, but nearly all of them have been released in the last couple of years, and all of them you are sure to love.

Our Panelists

John Dupuis is a science and engineering librarian at the Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University in Toronto. John has a Masters of Library and Information studies degree, and his research and professional interests include science books, the future of academic libraries, open access advocacy, scholarly communications in computer science, and Canadian science policy. He can be found online at his blog Confessions of a Science Librarian.

Mary Brock is a scientist who works in immunology. She loves reading books, particularly narrative nonfiction and Stephen King. She doesn't have enough time these days to watch all the movies she wants, but she does watch a lot of trailers. And her web browser usually has at least 30 tabs open, ostensibly to be read at an unknown time in the future. Mary is a contributor at Skepchick, runs their Book Club, and is a co-founder of Grounded Parents, a sister site that focuses on the intersection of science, skepticism, feminism, and parenting.

Rachelle Saunders is our very own producer and one of the hosts here at Science for the People, and she chimed in with a couple of her favourites too!

Their Favourite Books

A list of the science books discussed during the panel is below, organized by each panelists.

John Dupuis

• The Thrilling Adventure of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua
• Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani, translated by Malcolm DeBevoise
• Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon Brown
• The Strain: Book One of The Strain Trilogy by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan
• Look Who's Back, by Timur Vermes & Jamie Bulloch
• AsapSCIENCE: Answers to the World's Weirdest Questions, Most Persistent Rumors, and Unexplained Phenomena by Mitchell Moffit & Greg Brown
• Secret Coders by Gene Luen Yang & Mike Holmes
• How Machines Work: Zoo Break! by David Macaulay
• Steve Jobs: Insanely Great by Jessie Hartland
• This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips
• Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science by Alice Dreger
• The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys' Club by Eileen Pollack
• Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics under Hitler by Phillip Ball
• Genius At Play: The Curious Mind of John Horton Conway by Siobhan Roberts
• Applied Minds: How Engineers Think by Guruprasad Madhavan
• Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier
• Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis by Tim Flannery

Mary Brock

• Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?: A Neuroscientific View of the Zombie Brain by Timothy Verstynen & Bradley Voytek
• Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?: The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization by Andrew Lawler
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari & Eric Klinenberg
• Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine Written by Laurie Wallmark, Illustrated by April Chu
• The Blue Whale by Jenni Desmond
• Human Body Theater by Maris Wicks
• Science of the Magical: From the Holy Grail to Love Potions to Superpowers by Matt Kaplan
• The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science by Julie Des Jardins
• Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe
• Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories by Rob Brotherton
• Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes
• The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery by Sam Kean

Rachelle Saunders

• The Leading Indicators: A Short History of the Numbers That Rule Our World by Zachary Karabell
• To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

Are there great science books that came out this year that have been tragically left off the list? Share your favourites in the comments below!