Best Science Books 2011: Brain Pickings

Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure.

Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year.

All the previous 2011 lists are here.

This post includes the following: Brain Pickings The 11 Best Science Books of 2011.

• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch
• Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Lauren Redniss
• The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics by Clifford A. Pickover
• The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins
• Field Notes on Science & Nature by Michael R. Canfield (Editor)
• Feynman by Jim Ottaviani (Author), Leland Myrick (Illustrator)
• Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Societies, Art, Power, and Technology by John Brockman (editor)
• The Man of Numbers: Fibonacci's Arithmetic Revolution by Keith Devlin
• Future Science: Essays from the Cutting Edge by Max Brockman (editor)

(Only 9 titles are listed as two from the Brain Pickings list were pre-2011.)

I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot ca or in the comments.

I am picking up a lot of lists from Largehearted Boy.

The summary post for 2010 books is here and all the posts for 2010 can be found here. For 2009, it's here and here.

For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn't a science book is squishy at best, especially at the margins, but in the end I pick books that seem broadly about science and technology rather than something else completely. Lists of business, history or nature books are among the tricky ones.

And if you wish to support my humble list-making efforts, run on over to Amazon, take a look at Steve Jobs and consider picking that one up or something else from the lists.