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One minor personal accomplishment I scored this year is that it’s the first year since I started tracking, fully a decade ago, in which I’ve gotten through more than 20 purely extracurricular books. It’s not been easy, between the volume of text I work through as an academic and the propensity of social media to keep me focused on works that are, at most, long-form essays and articles. Still, one in particular thing cracked the code this year, and that was letting myself use audiobooks.
Swapping audiobooks in for podcasts on my running workouts opened up hours of book time every week, from narrative fiction to more science-adjacent stuff. It also turned out to come in handy for fieldwork trips, and I spent a lot of time driving out to the desert with a car-ful of students to survey Joshua tree populations. I signed up for a one-book-a-month membership at Libro.fm, where purchases benefit an independent bookstore of my choice — and which partners with the similarly bookseller-supporting Bookshop.org, where The Molecular Ecologist is an affiliate — and that’s proven to be about right for my consumption rate.
Adding more books to my media rotation has been good for my blood pressure in another year of frequently sad and frustrating and outright frightening news, and it’s put me in touch with some great science communicators. Here are some science books (and one that is at best science-adjacent) that I read or listened to this year, and which are, I think, each well worth your time — and maybe helpful if you’re still filling in the cracks of a holiday gift-giving list.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I am probably the last in a long, long line of plant- and science- and plant-science-focused people to recommend this book, but it really is that good. It’s a memoir told through the lens of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s relationship to plants, both as a botanist trained in mainstream western science and an Indigenous American, in the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Her perspective is invaluable and frequently eye-opening, and she reads the audiobook herself, beautifully. — Find it on Bookshop.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller. Anyone who’s taught more than a bit of phylogenetics knows the punchline to this book — that fish are paraphyletic to the rest of the vertebrates, which means either that we are all fish, or “fish” are actually an arbitrary collection of smaller clades — but that is much less important in the scheme of the book than you might expect. Rather, it’s a deep dive into the life story of the vertebrate taxonomist David Starr Jordan, which is checkered at best, interleaved with the author’s own history with science and belief. Miller is a Public Radio veteran, formerly a producer on RadioLab, and her reading of the audiobook has the voice and feel of a great history of science podcast series. — Find it on Bookshop.
Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening by Douglas Brinkley. This is magisterial, old-school history of the modern U.S. environmental movement, its legal victories under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and the seeds of opposition in the Nixon administration that now threaten it all. Brinkley traces the personal relationships of these presidents to nature and the environmental movement, but in particular shows how Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sits in the movement and the political maneuvering. Carson’s scientific writing provided a focal point, and a call to action, for so much of the work that has given us a cleaner, — Find it on Bookshop.
Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. I bought a copy of this for my lawyer boyfriend last year, and this year played it while driving students through the desert. It’s less focused on legalities, as it turns out, than on the ways humans have tried and often failed to navigate conflicts with wildlife. There’s a lot of descriptions of frequently gruesome wildlife-control methods, and how they inevitably fail. (As just one example: lacing fields with poison grain to kill birds that eat the harvest … and which are swiftly replaced by a new flock.) But there are also plenty of interviews with people working to resolve those conflicts, and figure out how we can share space with the rest of the animal kingdom. — Find it on Bookshop.
How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question by Michael Schur. This is, it turns out, a good year to contemplate what it means to live a good life, in the sense of both personal satisfaction and moral integrity. Schur, the writer and producer behind several of my favorite cozy-workplace sitcoms, may not seem an obvious writer to address this, but when I tell you that one of those sitcoms is The Good Place, it should make sense. That show’s frequently hilarious exploration of moral philosophy drew on a pretty solid depth of actual philosophy, including expert input. How to be Perfect is that background research in book form, and the audiobook has cast members from the show dropping in to read passages from Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant and the like. This one occupied some field-trip driving time, too, and inspired some legitimately good conversation. — Find it on Bookshop.
