The best science books about way more than science

Thanks to this beautiful book, I try to take a moment each day to look up at the sky.

The Cloudspotter’s Guide is so much more than just a guide to the science of how clouds form, or the different types – it’s a reminder to appreciate the unbelievably beautiful and epic natural forms that float above us every day.

Clouds, writes Pretor-Pinney, are ‘the most egalitarian of nature’s displays – we all have a good view of them’. And his guide is as much about how to take pleasure in this daily display as it is about the science of atmospherics, precipitation, and altitude. 

I bought this book so long ago its pages are yellowing and falling out. But when I’m busy and stressed, I still daydream of being able to sit in my garden and do nothing but watch the clouds roll by. When I am aboard a plane, I am always amazed that so few others are staring out at the vast fluffy sunlit cloudscapes out the window, as close as you can get to Heaven on Earth. 

As a philosopher, scientist, and scuba diver, Peter Godfrey Smith uses the remarkable biology of the octopus to make us think about how other organisms experience the world. Godfrey-Smith is such a capable and powerful writer, the book is almost worth buying just for his recap of how complex life on Earth evolved in the introduction. 

Octopuses have such a different kind of nervous system to ours that their limbs can sense and act independently from the central brain, and may even be able to ‘think’ for themselves. By studying such a radically different and surprisingly intelligent life form, Godfrey Smith is able to cast our minds, and our experience of the world, in an amazing new light too. 

It’s always good to try and see things from other person’s perspective – but trying to see the world from an octopus’s will really blow your mind.

Richard Dawkins is sadly now known mostly for his divisive polemics on religion and identity politics, but his early books on biology were unbelievably powerful.

The Blind Watchmaker helped flesh out, clarify, update, and expand Darwin’s theory of evolution for a massive audience, while also elegantly dismantling the common argument that life is so sophisticated that it must have been ‘designed’ by some kind of creator. 

As a young biologist, I read The Blind Watchmaker and was wowed by the way Dawkins explained how, under the right conditions, amazingly complex designs can arise from a simple system – without the need for anyone directing it or creating it.

Dawkins not only helps explain how life on Earth has advanced into the myriad forms we see on Earth today, but goes on to suggest that evolutionary systems might be at play in other aspects of our lives, like language and culture. Dawkins was talking about memes before memes were a thing.  

I’ve dipped into books about writing, storytelling, and scriptwriting before, and I’ve always found them to be utterly uninspiring, and in fact quite depressing – little more than a set of formulas to ensure your story’s structure is like other stories.

But Will Storr’s excellent book uses insights from evolutionary biology and psychology to help you get to understand why human minds love stories, and what it is about great stories that keeps readers turning the pages. His advice is powerful, simple – primal, even.

I’ve used this excellent book to help improve my writing and ensure my first book was a real page-turner. But The Science of Storytelling has also left a huge mark on me in terms of thinking about how and why we communicate. It’s for our own survival, after all. 

Mark O’Connell’s witty, weird, and worrying book explores the fringe scientific movement known as transhumanism. This disparate group of philosophers, engineers, rogue scientists, and hackers want to augment or merge the human body with technology, largely in order to advance their intellect and escape ageing and death.

While meeting a variety of transhumanists, O’Connell discusses the possible ways that technology could transform us as a species. From freezing ourselves to be re-awoken in the far distant future, to uploading our minds to a computer, there are all sorts of ambitious ideas out there to escape the limitations of nature.  

But where this book really sings is O’Connell’s beautiful (and often amusing) reflections on what it would really mean to live forever, or to live as a machine or computer chip rather than in an animal body and brain. It will make you appreciate your ageing animal body and your finite time on Earth, and those of your loved ones, more than ever.