The 100 best books about science and discovery by men

No. 11 on this list. Technics and Civilization · Lewis Mumford · 1934

The founding text of the history of technology as a humanistic discipline in English. Assigned in technology studies, urban planning, cultural history, and sociology of science courses worldwide. Republished by the University of Chicago Press with a new introduction by Langdon Winner. Considered essential to understanding how scholars think about machines and culture.

No. 12 on this list. Eugénie Grandet · Honoré de Balzac · 1833

Eugénie Grandet stands as a cornerstone of French literary realism and a key work in Balzac's vast Comédie humaine. It appears regularly in French literature curricula, realist novel courses, and 19th-century European literature surveys. The novel's dissection of provincial avarice and its portrait of female suffering under patriarchal capitalism have made it essential reading for understanding the realist tradition.

No. 13 on this list. Death and the King's Horseman · Wole Soyinka · 1975

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, stands at the threshold between worlds. Yoruba custom demands his ritual death to accompany the deceased king to the ancestral realm. The women of the market drape him in ceremonial cloth and sing him toward eternity, their voices a pulse beneath the drumming that orders his final hours. District Officer Pilkings, armed with Victorian certainty and Christian duty, arrests Elesin to prevent the suicide, confident that imprisonment saves a life. But the white man's intervention shatters something irreplaceable. Elesin's will fractures. The son, Olunde, returns from medical school in England having crossed an ocean to bury his father, only to discover his father imprisoned and the cosmic order inverted. When the body of the son is revealed as the final courier to the king, wrapped in cloth and carried by women, Elesin strangles himself with his chains. Soyinka orchestrates collision between cultures through idiom, rhythm, and the unstoppable momentum of ritual toward its terrible completion. The play's power resides not in resolving this clash but in exposing how each party acts from unshakeable conviction while remaining deaf to the other's fundamental logic.

No. 14 on this list. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea · Jules Verne · 1870

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea appears on curricula worldwide and is a fixture of science fiction canon lists from Penguin Classics to the Modern Library. Wikipedia articles for the novel exist in over 60 languages, reflecting its global reach across more than 150 years. It is among the handful of 19th-century adventure novels still routinely assigned in schools and universities outside their country of origin.

No. 15 on this list. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity · Charles Taylor · 1989

Charles Taylor argues that modern identity is not self-evident but has a history — one that can be traced from Plato through Augustine, Descartes, Locke, and Romanticism to the present. The modern sense of self involves a distinctive combination: an inner depth (the self as something to be discovered within), a commitment to ordinary life as morally significant, and an expressive individualism that equates authenticity with self-realization. Taylor's central concern is the 'moral ontology' that underlies modern identity — the implicit framework of goods and obligations within which we make sense of our lives. Without acknowledging this framework, modern moral philosophy cannot understand what it is actually doing. The book is a major work of philosophical anthropology and intellectual history, tracing how the self became a problem — something that requires explanation, exploration, and justification rather than simply acceptance.

No. 16 on this list. Treacle Walker · Alan Garner · 2022

Published in 2021, Treacle Walker is too recent for canonical judgment, but Garner's lifelong integration of British folklore into literary fiction gives it strong claims. As his late-career distillation of myth, archaeology, and language, it consolidates his reputation as a major British fantasist.

No. 17 on this list. The Art of the Novel · Milan Kundera · 1986

"The world of theories is not my world," Kundera announces on the first page — and then builds one of the most precise theories of the novel written by a practicing novelist. Across seven formally distinct sections — historical essay, interview, critical notes, alphabetical dictionary, prize address — he traces a counter-history of European fiction from Cervantes to Kafka, arguing that the novel exists to preserve what no other form can: the knowledge that human existence is irreducibly ambiguous. Kundera reads literary history like a composer analyzing a score. He tracks how Balzac's social institutions replaced Cervantes' open road, how Kafka stripped away all reasonable motivation to leave pure irrational force, how Hasek's comedy of the First World War revealed that nobody believed the propaganda anymore. His own aesthetic emerges from the dialogues with Christian Salmon: radical divestment, architectonic clarity, the novel as counterpoint of multiple registers held in tension. The book's boldest claim is also its simplest: the novel is 'the echo of God's laughter,' a space where certainty dissolves and uncertainty is not a weakness but the highest form of knowledge. Against totalitarian thinking — which Kundera knew firsthand from Czechoslovakia — the novel stands as the last form that refuses the 'either-or.' The sixty-three words section is the strangest and most useful: a personal dictionary of terms like kitsch, lightness, the agélaste, the Kafkan. Demanding without being difficult, this is a book for readers who love novels and want to understand what they are for.

No. 18 on this list. Basin and Range · John McPhee · 1981

Basin and Range is a standard text in creative nonfiction courses and frequently assigned in American universities alongside McPhee's other Annals volumes. While it lacks a standalone Wikipedia article in multiple languages, it is widely considered essential reading in the narrative science writing tradition and appears in geology and environmental humanities syllabi. Its canonical status is reinforced as part of Annals of the Former World, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

No. 19 on this list. Cryptonomicon · Neal Stephenson · 1999

Cryptonomicon occupies an unusual position: it is widely regarded as a landmark in its subgenre — techno-thriller crossed with literary novel — and is heavily referenced in discussions of fiction about cryptography, hacking culture, and digital privacy. It does not appear on standard literary syllabi, but it is routinely assigned in computer science departments, media studies courses, and cyberpunk/speculative fiction seminars. Its canonical status is high within its genre community but below the threshold of the broader literary canon.

No. 20 on this list. VALIS · Philip K. Dick · 1981

Horselover Fat — whose name translates Philip K. Dick from Greek and German — receives a beam of pink light in February 1974 and begins to know things he has no business knowing, including that his son has a life-threatening hernia. The narrator, Phil, reports all of this about Fat while being Fat, a split he names and never quite resolves. VALIS is Dick's attempt to make sense of what happened to him in 1974: whether the Vast Active Living Intelligence System actually fired information into his brain via satellite, or whether he simply had a breakdown after years of amphetamines and grief. He presents both possibilities with equal seriousness and refuses to choose between them. The novel draws on Gnostic Christianity, Zoroastrianism, the Nag Hammadi texts, and Soviet encyclopedia definitions of the plasmate to construct a theology in which the Roman Empire never ended and God is a living information system embedded in matter. Fat's friends — Kevin the cynic, David the orthodox Catholic, Phil the reluctant recorder — serve as sounding boards for arguments that the novel takes as seriously as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. The result is science fiction that reads like a psychiatric case file written by a man who cannot decide whether he is the patient or the prophet. Dick died before he finished the Exegesis he drew from. VALIS is what that project looked like when it had a plot.

No. 21 on this list. Open City · Teju Cole · 2011

Open City appears on multiple major best-novels-of-the-21st-century lists (The Guardian, Time magazine, NPR) and is widely taught in postcolonial, contemporary fiction, and American literature university courses. It has established canonical status within its decade, though it remains more recent than the settled canon.

No. 22 on this list. Man and Superman · George Bernard Shaw · 1903

Man and Superman appears on 86 university syllabi (48th percentile by Open Syllabus data) and holds Wikipedia articles in 9 languages. It is taught in drama and modern literature courses but sits behind Pygmalion and Major Barbara in Shaw's own canon. The Wikipedia article includes dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections, indicating sustained critical discourse.

No. 23 on this list. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea · Jules Verne · 1870

A staple of world adventure and science fiction, widely taught and abridged for school readers in many languages. It is a fixture of Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires, though less central to university literature courses than the major realist novels.

No. 24 on this list. The Demon-Haunted World · Carl Sagan · 1995

The Demon-Haunted World is widely assigned in critical thinking, philosophy of science, and introductory science courses at universities across the English-speaking world. Its 'baloney detection kit' chapter is excerpted in dozens of textbooks and anthologies, and the book appears on most 'essential reading' lists for scientific literacy.

No. 25 on this list. Demian · Hermann Hesse · 1919

Emil Sinclair, a young man in pre-WWI Germany, is drawn into the orbit of Max Demian, an enigmatic boy who introduces him to a world beyond conventional morality. As Sinclair journeys toward self-realization, he encounters mentors, visions, and the Jungian depths of his own psyche. Hesse's influential Bildungsroman of spiritual awakening.

No. 26 on this list. The Blithedale Romance · Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1852

The Blithedale Romance appears regularly in American literature syllabi as a key Hawthorne text alongside The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, and as a foundational text for the study of antebellum reform movements and utopian communities. It is less frequently assigned than The Scarlet Letter but appears in canonical anthologies and graduate programs in nineteenth-century American literature. Its canonical standing is solid if not dominant — comparable to, though below, Moby-Dick (88).

No. 27 on this list. Against Method · Paul Feyerabend · 1975

Against Method is standard required reading in philosophy of science courses at universities worldwide. The database shows no syllabus count or Wikipedia language data, which reflects a data gap rather than the book's actual status — it is foundational within the philosophy of science curriculum and appears on course syllabi across the English-speaking world and beyond. Its canonical position within academic philosophy is secure, though it does not reach the breadth of literary canons.

No. 28 on this list. The Innocents Abroad · Mark Twain · 1869

The Innocents Abroad appears frequently on university syllabi for 19th-century American literature and travel writing courses, though it is assigned less universally than Huckleberry Finn. It features on most canonical lists of American humor and is recognized as a founding document of the American travel narrative — a position that keeps it in academic circulation without making it a high school curriculum fixture.

No. 29 on this list. Against the Day · Thomas Pynchon · 2006

A late major work by a central postmodern author, taught in contemporary American fiction courses, though it carries less syllabus weight than Gravity's Rainbow or The Crying of Lot 49.

No. 30 on this list. Babel-17 · Samuel R. Delany · 1966

Babel-17 won the 1966 Nebula Award for Best Novel (tied with Flowers for Algernon) and appears on most SF core reading lists and New Wave SF curricula. It has limited presence on general literature university syllabi but is widely taught in SF-specific academic courses. Its canonical status is high within the genre and modest outside it.