Last year, when we were setting the schedule for the Bowie Bevy of Brainy Books, I went through my Audible back catalog and by my calculations, there are 209 titles in my library that I’ve yet to listen to. Some of these are scheduled in my upcoming meetup events but most are gathering dust as I am busy with the official book club list of titles.
Now that it’s time to chose the 2020–2021 Science Book Club. Although I run that meetup and have run it for longer than the founder Megan Thaler, which still amazes me, I always allow a democratic decision on the series of books we read, always scheduling the top 10–12 to form the cycle for the following 11–13 months, with December reserved for our retro cycle books.
I should explain, the Science Book Club has been running since 2009 and has a tremendous back catalog, and although I didn’t attend every meeting, I have attended every one since I began running it in the Summer of 2013. As such, I have a general rule that we can’t do any book we’ve done before in the group as part of the main eleven month year. Also, I require that books be published within the last ten years. I am a little lenient on this in terms of allowing books technically eleven years old given that I’m planning for books into 2021 but allow books from 2010, but no earlier. But official, the rule is no repeats, no fiction, and no books older than ten years. If a book fails any of those tests, it goes into the December book bin, were I allow anything goes!
After winnowing out all the older books, the Great Courses and Fiction books in my back catalog, I was left with fifty books the Science Book Club has never discussed and are at most ten years old. The are as follows:
- [Medicine] The Case Against Sugar (Gary Taubes, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
- [Sociology] God, No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales (Penn Jillette, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
- [Neurology] The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery (Sam Kean, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
- [Neurology] The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (V. S. Ramachandran, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
- [Mathematics] Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data (Charles Wheelan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/302
- [Chemistry] The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (Denise Kiernan, 2013)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
- [Medicine] Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them (Jennifer Wright, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/336
- [Neurology] Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Nick Bostrom, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Ecology] Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Bill McKibben, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
- [Sociology] Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find – and Keep – Love (Amir Levine, Rachel Heller, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Chemistry] The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Kate Moore, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
- [Biology] American Pharoah: The Untold Story of the Triple Crown Winner’s Legendary Rise (Joe Drape, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Technology] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
- [Astronomy] The 4-Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Richard Panek, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/297
- [Physics] The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (Thomas Levenson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
- [Biology] The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World (Peter Wohlleben, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
- [Genetics] A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Physics] The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (Michio Kaku, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
- [Technology] Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
- [Neurology] Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (Annie Duke, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/288
- [Mathematics] The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America’s Enemies (Jason Fagone, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
- [Medicine] Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (Florence Williams, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Technology] Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War (Paul Scharre, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/448
- [Chemistry] Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder – A Journey into the Wild World of Nuclear Science (James Mahaffey, 2017)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/464
- [Medicine] Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong (Paul A. Offit, MD, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/288
- [Medicine] Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ (Giulia Enders, 2015)📖💻💿🏢/271
- [Biology] American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (Nate Blakeslee, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
- [Biology] Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Biology] The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (Thor Hanson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Mathematics] Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Medicine] First Bite: How We Learn to Eat (Bee Wilson, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Medicine] Are u ok?: A Guide to Caring for Your Mental Health (Kati Morton LMFT, 2018)🕮💻💿FALSE/256
- [Medicine] Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (Thomas Hager, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
- [Physics] The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter (Paul Steinhardt, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
- [Medicine] The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth: And Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine (Thomas Morris, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
- [Sociology] Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free (Wednesday Martin PhD, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
- [Mathematics] Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray (Sabine Hossenfelder, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Neurology] The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home (Dan Ariely, 2010)📖🕮💻💿🏢/334
- [Medicine] Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (David Quammen, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/592
- [Economics] Money: The Unauthorized Biography (Felix Martin, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
- [Physics] The Science of Interstellar (Kip Thorne, 2014)📖💻💿🏢/336
- [Ecology] The Omnivore’s Dilemma: Young Readers Edition (Michael Pollan, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
- [Mathematics] Code Warriors: NSA’s Codebreakers and the Secret Intelligence War Against the Soviet Union (Stephen Budiansky, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/416
- [Evolution] Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Yuval Noah Harari, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
- [Medicine] Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (Serhii Plokhy, 2018)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/432
- [Physics] The Order of Time (Carlo Rovelli, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
- [Sociology] The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (Mark Forsyth, 2012)📖💻💿FALSE/304
- [Technology] The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Donald A. Norman, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/368
- [Medicine] Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes (Nathan H. Lents, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
- [Ecology] My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places (Mary Roach, 2013)📖💻💿🏢/160
I should explain here the shorthand I use to indicate the formats supported by each book. Unicode has icons for each of the formats as follows:
- 📖: Paperback
- 🕮: Hard Cover (Note, this Unicode Glyph doesn’t appear on all platforms)
- 💻: eBook, such as Kindle
- 💿: Audiobook, as in Audible
- 🏢: The book is in the Library (this glyph, when present, contains a link to its entry in the Fairfax County Public Library card catalog)
The long and short of that is, to enter fifty new books into the nomination queue is a very tedious affair and took me so many hours yesterday, I forgot to post my note about TeslaOS 2020.20.5 on Thursday.
For the record, my fifty entries were appended to the end of the existing seventeen moniations already made or carried forward from the last poll. We are, therefore, in addition to the above, also considering the following books:
- [Physics] Through Two Doors at Once: The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality (Anil Ananthaswamy, 2018)🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Genetics] Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (George M. Church, Ed Regis, 2012)📖🕮💻🏢/304
- [Genetics] Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize (Sean B. Carroll, 2013)📖🕮💻🏢/592
- [Biology] The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (Andrea Wulf, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/496
- [Evolution] From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (Daniel C. Dennett, 2017)🕮💻💿🏢/496
- [Technology] Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Biology] The Plant Messiah: Adventures in Search of the World’s Rarest Species (Carlos Magdalena, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
- [Sociology] Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
- [Ecology] The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after Warming (David Wallace-Wells, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
- [Astronomy] The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe: How to Know What’s Really Real in a World Increasingly Full of Fake (Steven Novella, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/512
- [Health] How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Michael Pollan, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/480
- [Geology] Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History (Lewis Dartnell, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/320
- [Geology] The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (Peter Brannen, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/322
- [Ecology] The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature (David George Haskell, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/268
- [Ecology] The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (David George Haskell, 2017)📖🕮💻💿🏢/304
- [Biology] Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live (Rob Dunn, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/323
- [Genetics] The Gene: An Intimate History (Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2016)📖🕮💻💿🏢/608
Thus, over the weekend, assuming no more last-minute nominations, I will be create a poll with sixty-seven entries, asking my members to rank them on a five-point system and then use those star rankings and member attendance history to calculate the top 10–12 books and then generate our schedule through the summer of 2021—with the exception of December.
As for the December, 2020 meeting, nineteen books from my back catalog didn’t satisfy my ten year or repeat criterion, and so I added them to the three books carried over from last December’s poll. The first three books are the ones carried over, the rest are from my back catalog.
- Measuring Eternity: The Search for the Beginning of Time (Martin Gorst, 2001)📖🕮💻🏢/352
- How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (Ray Kurzweil, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- (Fiction) The Witness Paradox: A Time Traveler Anthology (Martin Wilsey, TR Dillon, Jeffrey C. Jacobs, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/246
- iWoz: How I Invented the Personal Computer and Had Fun Along the Way (Steve Wozniak, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/313
- How the Mind Works (Steven Pinker, 1998)📖🕮💻💿🏢/660
- Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution (Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
- Fear Of Physics: A Guide For The Perplexed (Lawrence M. Krauss, 1993)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/224
- The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild (Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence, 2009)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
- Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic (Esther Perel, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
- The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America (Steven Johnson, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/272
- Freakonomics [Revised and Expanded]: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner, 2006)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
- Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos (Michio Kaku, 2004)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/428
- The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms (Amy Stewart, 2004)📖🕮💻💿🏢/256
- The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (Richard P. Feynman, 1999)📖🕮💻💿🏢/270
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (Mary Roach, 2003)📖🕮💻💿🏢/303
- Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Mary Roach, 2005)📖🕮💻💿🏢/311
- Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (John McWhorter, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/230
- Apollo: The Race to the Moon (Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox, 1989)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/506
- Silent Spring (Rachel Carson, 2002)📖🕮💻💿🏢/400
- Song for the Blue Ocean (Carl Safina, 1998)📖🕮💻💿FALSE/458
- Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (Carl Sagan, 1997)📖🕮💻💿🏢/244
- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (Carl Sagan, 2008)📖🕮💻💿🏢/457
So much reading, so little time! Can’t wait to hear what y’all want to read, my sapiosexual friends!
UPDATE 2020-04-10 21:30: I do encourage my Science Readers to retrieve all the information above, such the full title, all authors and their full names, what formats the books are in, a link to the library listing, the publication year and the page count, and post all this to the Meetup Message Board. I do this because I get an email notification every time someone posts there. It’s hard to get to, to be sure, but when I send the email reminding folks to nominate things, I do provide a direct link to the Message Board discussion.
It’s therefore sad that most of my members used the new Meetup Discussion list instead. I get no notifications of any kind when people post here so I was shocked to see, when I posted a link to this article, that in fact a lot of my members posted sketchy book information to that list. A few of the nominations were in the list, but fourteen were new, as far as I could tell.
Of course, not wanting to ignore my member’s wishes, I spent a few more hours today trying to add all their nominations to the list. There are now eighty nominations, thirteen more added.
- [Medicine] The Body: A Guide for Occupants (Bill Bryson, 2019)📖🕮💻💿🏢/464
- [Technology] The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect (Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie, 2018)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432
- [Medicine] The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (Nessa Carey, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/352
- [Evolution] Lamarck’s Revenge: How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution’s Past and Present (Peter Ward, 2018)🕮💻🏢/288
- [Biology] Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (Jim Al-Khalili, 2017)🕮💻💿FALSE/240
- [Physics] The World According to Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2020)🕮💻💿FALSE/336
- [Physics] Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics (Jim Al-Khalili, 2012)📖🕮💻💿🏢/239
- [Technology] What the Future Looks Like: Scientists Predict the Next Great Discoveries―and Reveal How Today’s Breakthroughs Are Already Shaping Our World (Jim Al-Khalili, 2018)📖💻💿FALSE/240
- [Technology] The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance (Jim Al-Khalili, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/336
- [Medicine] Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (Jim Al-Khalili, 2015)📖🕮💻💿🏢/368
- [Technology] An Optimist’s Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer What’s Next? (Mark Stevenson, 2011)📖🕮💻🏢/384
- [Technology] We Do Things Differently: The Outsiders Rebooting Our World (Mark Stevenson, 2018)📖🕮💻FALSE/304
- [Physics] Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (Max Tegmark, 2014)📖🕮💻💿🏢/432
In addition to these thirteen, one more nomination was added to the December list because it’s a book we discussed in the group before.
- The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos (Brian Greene, 2011)📖🕮💻💿🏢/384
Exhausted but still sapiosexual.