The best books for feeling awestruck about the world

Sometimes, a voice actor is the absolute right choice for an audiobook. (I think this was the case for my book, which was read by George Newbern — whose voice I quickly recognized as the cartoon Superman.) Other times, though, absolutely nobody but the actual author will do, and this is most certainly the case with Camilla Pang’s beautifully written — and narrated — book about human behavior. I’ve both read and listened to Explaining Humans, and I recommend the latter, for Pang’s particular manner of emphasis, inflection, and cadence add color, clarity, and personality to her written words. And this, to me, was tremendously helpful, because Explaining Humans is not so much a scientific explanation for why we humans are such peculiar creatures as it is a series of scientific analogies that help explain how Pang — a computational biologist who is autistic — has come to understand many of the seemingly illogical behaviors of our species.

Reading and listening to Explaining Humans felt like a very intimate peek inside Pang’s mind — and her ruminations have prompted me to consider many other ways in which science can offer us a lens through which we can see the world in a new light, even (and perhaps especially) when it cannot provide a specific answer to the questions we ask along the way.

Something very deep and very old struck me as I was reading the first pages of The Home Place, so much that it drew me out of the prose and into a state of contemplation. There was something resoundingly familiar about J. Drew Lantham’s writing, and it wasn’t until I was able to lay hands on it — literally, in the form of the yellowed pages of my copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac — that I was able to continue reading Lantham’s exquisite memoir. Creative but concrete, florid but exacting, Lantham is an ascendant heir to Leopold, for The Home Place is not just a warmly written tribute to nature’s stunning beauty but an at-first troubling, and ultimately inspiring, examination of the question “Who gets to have these experiences?” 

On a riverbank in the tiny town of Rifle, Colorado, is an unassuming plot of land that most people would pass without a second thought. For me, though, that spot is like a temple — because it is there that researchers discovered 28 entirely new phyla of microorganisms. (By way of comparison, the entire kingdom Animalia contains approximately 31 phyla.) I wouldn’t have known to appreciate this discovery, though, if I hadn’t first read Paul Falkowski’s wonderful book about microbes. Like most folks, I’d known that all life on our planet stemmed from the creatures so small we cannot see them. But what I hadn’t fully contemplated before Life’s Engines was just how much these tiny organisms have done to create a world where other forms of life could thrive.

Falkowski told that story in a way that was accessible, exciting, and thought-provoking, offering me the opportunity to conceptualize the world in a new way. With that, places like that little patch of land in Colorado no longer seemed ordinary, but rather holy — for every step we take to understand the smallest life on our planet allows us to understand the origins of everything else.

Among the biggest frustrations in my life are the moments I call “commuter questions”. These are the sorts of ponderings that pop into my head when I’m making the 90-minute drive from my home to the university where I teach, and when — safe driver that I am — I can’t simply hop online to hunt for an answer. Inevitably, by the time I’ve found a parking spot on campus, the question has disappeared from my mind. But where do those questions go? Well, apparently, they somehow wind up in Bristol, England, where science writers Matin Durrani and Liz Kalaugher are based. In Furry Logic, Durrani and Kalaugher address in-and-out-of-your-head questions like “Can mosquitoes fly in a rainstorm?” and “How do eels generate electricity?” And the answers are delightful.