Science-Book Challenge 2009

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The image is a portion of the fractal Mandelbrot set, created by Kevin Wong (source); Creative Commons License, used with permission. Please use this image in your own blog to publicize the 2009 Science-Book Challenge.
Read a book for science literacy!
Join the challenge any time in 2009.

The Science-Book Challenge is easy: read three science books in 2009, then tell others about the books you've read and help spread science literacy.

Reading about science--by which we mean to include engineering, mathematics, and technology, too--is fun and rewarding. We encourage others to read about science, and help potential readers find books that they will enjoy and profit from reading, by publishing our Book Notes, which are written by Ars Hermeneutica employees, volunteers, friends, and science-book challengers.

We're looking for science-book readers to help us help would-be science-book readers by sharing their own opinions about the science books they've read.

The 2009 Science-Book Challenge

  1. Read at least three nonfiction books in 2009 related somehow to the theme "Nature's Wonders". Your books should have something to do with science, scientists, how science operates, or science's relationship with its surrounding culture. Your books might be popularizations of science, they might be histories, they might be biographies, they might be anthologies; they can be recent titles or older books. We take a very broad view of what makes for interesting and informative science reading.
  2. After you've read a book, write a short note about it, giving your opinion of the book. What goes in the note? The things you would tell a friend if you wanted to convince your friend to read it--or avoid it. Naturally, you can read some of the existing Book Notes for ideas. You might like to read our Book-note ratings for ideas about how to evaluate your books.
  3. Don't worry if you find that you've read a book someone else has also read; we welcome multiple notes on one title.
  4. Get your book note to us and we'll post it with the other notes in our Book Note section. Use the book-note form or the comment form to get in touch with us.
  5. Tell other people about the Science-Book Challenge: http://ArsHermeneutica.org/besieged/Science-Book_Challenge_2009.

Stuck for ideas about what books to read? Write to us and we'll help you identify some books that will match your interests.

If you'd like to sign up and make your participation in the Science-Book Challenge public, send us your name and a link to your blog, if you have one, using our comment form.

Please help us tell others, too! Use your own blog to spread the word; use our Science-Book Challenge 2009 graphic to make it pretty.

Happy reading!

The Science-Book Challengers

Everyone should feel free to accept the challenge any time before the end of 2009. Decide on your book list at the beginning or be more spontaneous and choose titles as you go. Let us know that you're taking the challenge and we'll put your name here with other challengers, along with updates about your notes as you contribute them. You can use the handy comment form to reach us. You might find it interesting to look at last year's list of challengers in the Science-Book Challenge 2008.

Here are the people we are aware of who have accepted the Science-Book Challenge 2009.

Challenger Link Titles & Links to Book Notes
Melanie K. The Indextrious Reader spontaneous
Jenny S. n/a spontaneous
Callista SMS Book Reviews spontaneous
Lynda Lynda's Book Blog tentatively:
Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? : And 101 Other Intriguing Science Questions, by Mick O'Hare
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
How to Dunk a Doughnut : The Science Of Everyday Life, by Len Fisher
Violette Severin The Mystery Bookshelf spontaneous
Lisa Clayton n/a spontaneous
Lindy n/a spontaneous
Jody The Year of Readers spontaneous
Eva A Striped Armchair (Visit her blog for an extensive list of possible titles!)
Brandi The Reading Challenges Blog spontaneous
Melanie Cynical Optimism spontaneous
Care Care’s Online Book Club spontaneous
Kristi Books and Needlepoint spontaneous
Pussreboots Puss Reboots Dr. Joe and What You Didn't Know by Dr. Joe Schwarcz
Hawaiian Insects and their Kin, by F. G. Howarth and W. P. Mull
Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester
Mars, the Red Planet, by Isaac Asimov
Roadside Geology of Hawaii, by Richard W. Hazlett and Donald W. Hyndman
The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins
The Borderlands of Science: Where Sense Meets Nonsense, by Michael Shermerer
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin
Joanna It's all about me The Story of God, by Robert Winston
The Force, by Lynne McTaggart
God and the New Physics, by Paul Davies
Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments, by Alex Boese
Your Inner Fish: The Amazing Discovery of Our 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor, by Neil Shubin
What the Bleep do we Know?, by William Arntz and Betsy Chasse
The Quirks & Quarks Guide to Space : 42 Questions (and Answers) about Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Jim Lebans
Debi Reading Challenge Obsessed... (Visit her blog for an extensive list of possible titles!)
Jessi Casual Dread Tentative list:
Misquoting Jesus, by Bart D. Ehrman
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
The Edge of the Sea, by Rachel Carson
Rebecca Rebecca Reads Some possibilities:
DNA, by James Watson
Cosmos, by Carl Sagan
Napoleon’s Buttons, by Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson
Proust Was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer
The Ancestor’s Tale, by Richard Dawkins
God’s Equation, by Amir Azcel
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking.
Judy D. Intergalactic Bookworm spontaneous
raidergirl3 an adventure in reading spontaneous
T. Robertson n/a The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Apirituality, by Dalai Lama
Death's Acre: Inside the Legendary Forensic Lab the Body Farm Where the Dead Do Tell Tales, by William Bass
What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture, by Edward Slingerland
Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, by Michael S. Gazzaniga
Rich Dick-o's Deep Thoughts Possibles:
Bones of Contention, by Paul Chambers
The Red Queen, by Matt Ridley
Life of Insects, by Vincent Wigglesworth
The Pleasures of Entomology, by Howard Evans
Any one of the wonderful books by Stephen Jay Gould, especially Wonderful Life
Biology of the Amphibia, by Gladwyn Noble
EHL n/a spontaneous
Adrienne Titles are Irrelevant planned:
Monster of God, by David Quammen
Alex & Me, by Irene Pepperberg
Parasite Rex, by Carl Zimmer
R. Williams facebook challenger spontaneous
S. Poduska facebook challenger spontaneous
C. Howard facebook challenger spontaneous
J.P. Howard facebook challenger spontaneous
J. Dorrance facebook challenger spontaneous
T. Wilson facebook challenger spontaneous
B. Kane facebook challenger spontaneous
D. Robertson facebook challenger spontaneous
Chile Chile Chews spontaneous
Jen R. Living Life Simply tentatively:
Blue Frontier, by David Helvarg
The Earth Moved, by Amy Stewart
Bottomfeeder, by Taras Grescoe
Joyce tallgrassworship Watermania, by Eliazbeth Royte
This is Your Brain on Music, The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin
The End of Food, by Paul Roberts
Matheus Second is the Rest possibles:
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman
The Linguistics Wars, by Randy Allen Harris
Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, by Daniel Dennett
On Nature and Language, by Noam Chomsky
Language and Mind, by Noam Chomsky
The Empirical Stance, by Bas van Fraassen
Pursuit of Truth, by W. V. Quine
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn
psuklinkie Light Up My Room In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollen
The Anatomist, by Bill Hayes
Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
The Way We Eat, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Debra n/a spontaneous
Rose Making the Shift spontaneous
     
RRT n/a spontaneous
SJB n/a spontaneous
JNS Bearcastle Blog spontaneous
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