The best books about nerds getting into trouble

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist making her way in a very sexist lab in the 1960s who ends up creating a chemistry-inspired cooking show that empowers everyone who watches it. She’s inspiring and relentless and funny as hell. It was a GoodReads Choice winner in 2022 and I’m not surprised.

This book helped me to slog through some low moments in my own life and made me think about cooking in a whole new way. “I’m disrupting the egg’s internal bonds in order to elongate the amino acid chain,” she told the dog in typical nerd fashion. (The dog survives.) I loved her precision in language and life and the absurdity it brings.

You can’t talk about nerds in trouble without mentioning Andy Weir. This one came out in the pandemic and it’s about a man who wakes up in a spaceship and doesn’t know who he is or what he’s supposed to do. I read this during the second year of the pandemic and I very much sympathized with his plight—he can’t go outside because it will kill him, he senses that he has important things to do, and he has a lingering feeling of existential dread. But even with all those worries, Ryland Grace manages to find his way forward with science and logic and humor. He’s nerdy and funny and he’s going to try to save the world.

I read this novella in one long insomniac night, snorting with laughter so much that I eventually had to leave the bedroom to keep from waking up my husband. A murderous bot overrides its programming so it doesn’t have to do quite so much murdering and instead can sneak off to watch television shows. But pesky humans keep pressing it into service to keep them from killing themselves and each other. It’s science fiction and crime fiction and a wry study of the human condition all rolled up together.

Murderbot is cynical, funny, and surprisingly heartwarming. We all have inner Murderbots, but we’re very lucky that we don’t all let them out. Too much. First in a series.

A nonfiction book about an actual nerd who stubbornly investigated a 75 cent accounting error and ended up uncovering an international espionage ring during the Cold War. As nerds do. Along the way, he invented many techniques still used in cybersecurity. It ought to be dry, but it’s funny and charming and it perfectly evokes Berkeley in the 1980s. I was a computer operator at Carnegie Mellon and my workday was very similar to Stoll’s. For me this book was a time machine to my early 20s. I could see, hear, and feel every scene. If you ever think that your nerdy obsessions don’t matter—this shows that they do.

This one’s darker than the others on my list. I’ve worked in high-tech for years and the world of the Circle is far too close to my working life. The dystopian story of a young woman who stumbles into a dystopian world filled with surveillance and the eradication of privacy is chilling. And the veneer of toxic positivity that the Circle presents to the wider world is too familiar to ignore. I’ve worked at places that are only a few small steps removed from the one in this story, and I worry that we will all end up living in that world. These are not funny, happy nerds who will save the world if they can. But they’re nerds and they’re definitely causing trouble.