Best Science Books 2014: Wired

As you all have no doubt noticed over the years, I love highlighting the best science books every year via the various end of year lists that newspapers, web sites, etc. publish. I've done it so far in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.

And here we are in 2014!

As in previous years, my definition of "science books" is pretty inclusive, including books on technology, engineering, nature, the environment, science policy, history & philosophy of science, geek culture and whatever else seems to be relevant in my opinion.

Today's list is Wired: The Best Science Books We Read in 2014.

• Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande
• The Book of Beetles: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred of Nature's Gems by Patrice Bouchard
• Faster, Higher, Stronger: How Sports Science Is Creating a New Generation of Superathletes--and What We Can Learn from Them by Mark McClusky
• Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty by Vikram Chandra
• Molecules: The Elements and the Architecture of Everything by Theodore Gray and Nick Mann
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
• How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Great Myths of the Brain by Christian Jarrett
• Spineless by Susan Middleton
• Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
• The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science by Armand Marie Leroi
• Proof: The Science of Booze by Adam Rogers
• Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves by Laurel Braitman
• The Public Domain Review: Selected Essays, 2011-2013

And check out my previous 2014 lists here!

Many of the lists I use use are sourced via the Largehearted Boy master list.

(Astute readers will notice that I kind of petered out on this project last year and never got around to the end of year summary. The last few years I ended up featuring dozens of lists, virtually every list I could find that had science books on it. While it was kind of cool to be so comprehensive, not to mention that it gave the summary posts a certain statistical weight, it was also way more work than I had really envisioned way back in 2008 or so when I started doing this. As a result, I'm only going to highlight particularly large or noteworthy lists this year and forgo any kind of end of year summary. Basically, all the fun but not so much of the drudgery.)