Best Science Books 2012: Largehearted Boy, OUPBlog, Michael Brand and more

Another bunch of lists 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 2012 lists are here.

This post includes the following:

Largehearted Boy Favorite Nonfiction of 2012

• Things That Are by Amy Leach

OUPBlog: Abby Gross’s top books of 2012

• Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature by David Barash

Michael Brand The 5 Best Nonfiction Books of 2012

• Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson

TDN.com: Library Corner: Best books of 2012

• Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection by A.J. Jacobs

Village Books Picks Their 2012 Favorites

• The Math Book: From Pythagoras to the 57th Dimension, 250 Milestones in the History of Mathematicsby Clifford A. Pickover
• Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt

Big Data Big Analytics: Our Favorite Reads of 2012

• The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’tby Nate Silver
• C# 5.0 in a Nutshell, 5th Edition: The Definitive Reference by Joseph Albahari, Ben Albahari

Once More With Geekery: Nat's Best of Books 2012 Edition!

• Quiet by Susan Cain

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 most of my lists from Largehearted Boy.

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 or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks or maybe even something else from today's list.