The 100 best books about science and discovery

No. 11 on this list. The Periodic Table · Primo Levi · 1975

Named the best science book ever written by the Royal Institution; a recognized literary masterwork.

No. 12 on this list. The Selfish Gene · Richard Dawkins · 1976

Four billion years ago, a molecule capable of copying itself appeared in the primordial soup. Everything since — every bacterium, beetle, and human being — is a machine built by those replicators to carry them forward. Richard Dawkins published this argument in 1976, and it reorganized how biologists, philosophers, and general readers think about evolution. The unit of selection, Dawkins argues, is not the species, not the group, not even the individual organism. It is the gene. Organisms are temporary coalitions built by genes competing for spots in the next generation. Altruism, cooperation, parent-offspring conflict, and sex ratios all follow from this single reorientation of perspective. Dawkins builds his case through thirteen chapters of escalating clarity, anchoring every theoretical claim in concrete animal behavior: penguins refusing to be the first in the water, praying mantises eating their mates mid-copulation, worker bees dying to protect the hive. The book's penultimate chapter introduces the meme — a unit of cultural replication analogous to the gene — as a second kind of replicator that has emerged in human minds. Written for the general reader who has no specialized knowledge but is unwilling to be patronized, The Selfish Gene remains the most precise and readable account of Darwinian logic ever written for a non-specialist audience.

No. 13 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. 14 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. 15 on this list. Tar Baby · Toni Morrison · 1981

On Isle des Chevaliers, a Caribbean island reshaped by Haitian labor and American money, Valerian Street — a retired Philadelphia candy magnate — cultivates hydrangeas in his greenhouse and avoids his neighbors. His wife Margaret, his butler Sydney and cook Ondine, and his niece Jadine, a model trained in Paris, share the villa in a state of maintained tension. When Son — a Black American fugitive who stowed away on their supply boat — is discovered hiding in the house, he breaks open every unspoken arrangement the household depends on. Morrison uses the folk tale of the tar baby as the novel's armature: Jadine and Son become stuck to each other in a relationship that neither can survive and neither can leave. She embodies what he calls racial betrayal — educated in Europe, photographed in furs, at home nowhere. He embodies what she calls romantic primitivism — a man out of time, faithful to a Black Southern past that she finds suffocating. Morrison writes this conflict without a referee. The Caribbean setting is not backdrop but argument — the swamp, the rain forest, the blind horsemen who ride the hills at night all carry the weight of African spiritual history beneath the colonial surface. The novel ends on a mythic image: Son running toward those horsemen, Jadine flying back to Paris. Morrison offers no verdict on who was right.

No. 16 on this list. Guns, Germs, and Steel · Jared Diamond · 1997

The verified data signals show no syllabus or Wikipedia entries on file for this title, but Guns, Germs, and Steel has been a fixture of introductory world-history, geography, and anthropology courses since the late 1990s and was adapted into a three-part PBS/National Geographic documentary in 2005. It sits below a literary classic like The Great Gatsby in curricular ubiquity but comfortably ahead of a work with only cult-course status.

No. 17 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. 18 on this list. The Invisible Man · H.G. Wells · 1897

The Invisible Man occupies a firm place in the science fiction canon and appears on university syllabi worldwide, particularly in courses on early SF and Victorian literature. H.G. Wells's scientific romances are among the most consistently reprinted and anthologized works in the genre. While not at the level of Great Expectations or The Great Gatsby in general literary curricula, it is a standard text in SF and genre studies.

No. 19 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. 20 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. 21 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. 22 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. 23 on this list. Ceremony · Leslie Marmon Silko · 1977

Tayo comes home from the Pacific War unable to sleep. The voices won't stop—Japanese soldiers shouting, his uncle Josiah calling to him through jungle heat, his cousin Rocky dying in the mud of a prison march. The VA hospital calls it battle fatigue. His grandmother calls for a medicine man. The land around Laguna Pueblo is in its sixth year of drought, and Tayo believes, with a guilt that sits in his stomach like a stone, that he caused it—that his wartime curse against the rain followed him home. Silko writes two novels at once: a realist account of a mixed-blood veteran's breakdown and his slow return to the living, and a mythic narrative of Laguna ceremony, the stories of Thought-Woman and Reed Woman and Hummingbird woven directly into the prose as poetry. The two registers don't sit beside each other—they bleed into each other, memory becoming hallucination, hallucination becoming vision, vision becoming healing. The spotted Mexican cattle Josiah bought before the war, wild and drought-adapted and worth finding, serve as Tayo's purpose and his proof that something can survive. The novel ends with resolution—Tayo completes his ceremony, the rain returns—but not before Silko has made plain what was nearly lost: the web of story that holds a people together, which colonial schooling nearly succeeded in cutting. This is a novel about what stories do when they are the only medicine left.

No. 24 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. 25 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. 26 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. 27 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. 28 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. 29 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. 30 on this list. The Tombs of Atuan · Ursula K Le Guin · 1971

The Tombs of Atuan is the second volume of Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, which has been a staple of middle school and YA curricula for decades. It won the Newbery Honor in 1972. While not as universally taught as the first Earthsea volume or Le Guin's science fiction, it appears regularly in fantasy literature courses and feminist literary criticism syllabi, cementing its place as a significant canonical text within speculative fiction.