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For one last time, John Dupuis and Joanne Manaster have joined us here at Science for the People to recommend their favourite science reads from the last year... and beyond! This is a companion blog to the 7 December 2023 episode The Last Science Book Club: below is the list of science books discusssed on that episode. As usual, we've added our affiliate tag to these links so if you buy something from Amazon because we sent you, we get a little kickback of around $0.50.

While we do provide Amazon links below, as always we encourage you to purchase books from your locally owned and operated bookstores if you can: support the people in your community before throwing money at Amazon!

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Best of the Best

• Joanne: Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
• Joanne: Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes by Christine Yu
• John: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant
• John: The Bomb: The Weapon That Changed the World by Didier Alcante and Laurent-Frédéric Bollée, illustrated by Denis Rodier, translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

Pleasant Surprises

• Joanne: Period: The Real Story of Menstruation by Kate Clancy
• John: Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken

Mind Changers

• Joanne: Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb
• John: How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World by Deb Chachra

Couldn't Put Down

• Joanne: Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant
• Joanne: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell
• John: The Last Cold Place: A Field Season Studying Penguins in Antarctica by Naira de Gracia

Read Again

• Joanne: What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk by Laurence Moran
• John: The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg
• John: Climate Changed: A Personal Journey through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni

Funniest

• Joanne: A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
• Joanne: Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
• Joanne and John: Anything by Mary Roach by
• John: I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor by Andrew Boyd
• John: Department of Mind-Blowing Theories by Tom Gauld
• John: How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

Learned Something

• Joanne: Reading the Glass: A Captain's View of Weather, Water, and Life on Ships by Elliot Rappaport
• Joanne: Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World by Theresa MacPhail
• John: Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy

Science Biography or History

• Joanne: The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike
• Joanne: Walking Out on the Boys by Frances Conley
• John: The Woman with the Cure by Lynn Cullen
• John: Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon Brown

For People Who Don't Read Science

• Joanne: Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken
• Joanne: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott Shapiro
• John: The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean by Susan Casey
• John: The Dirty Tricks Department: Stanley Lovell, the OSS, and the Masterminds of World War II Secret Warfare by John Lisle
• John: The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb by Sam Kean

For Avid Science Readers

• Joanne: What's in Your Genome?: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk by Laurence Moran
• John: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
• John: The Devil's Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan
• John: The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow

Science Fiction

• Joanne: Machine: A White Space Novel by Elizabeth Bear
• John: Red Team Blues: A Martin Hench Novel by Cory Doctorow
• John: Bones Are Forever by Kathy Reichs
• John: Kolchak: The Night Stalker – 50th Anniversary Graphic Novel by James Aquilone

Science Books for Children

• Joanne: Buzzing with Questions: The Inquisitive Mind of Charles Henry Turner by Janice N. Harrington, Illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
• Joanne: Rooting for Plants: The Unstoppable Charles S. Parker, Black Botanist and Collector by Janice N. Harrington, Illustrated by Theodore Taylor III
• Joanne: Sew Sister: The Untold Story of Jean Wright and NASA's Seamstresses by Elise Matich
• John: Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin
• John: Voïvod : le thrash métal expliqué aux enfants by Pierre PisHier

On the Wish List

• Joanne: The Six: The Untold Story of America's First Women Astronauts by Loren Grush
• Joanne: Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth by Claire Horn
• Joanne: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
• Joanne: Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir
• John: Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
• John: DARK PR: How Corporate Disinformation Harms Our Health and the Environment by Grant Ennis
• John: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
• John: The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan

Most Looking Forward To

• Joanne: The Infinite Extent by Ed Yong
• Joanne: Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan
• Joanne: The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt
• Joanne: Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations by Cutter Wood
• John: The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston

Recently Re-read

• Joanne: The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan
• John: The War Of The Worlds movie (1953)

White Whale Book

• Joanne: On the origin of species by Charles Darwin
• John: Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson

Final Mentions

• Joanne: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• John: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• John: The Way of the Hive: A Honey Bee's Story written and illustrated by Jay Hosler
• John: The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer by Sydney Padua