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Seasonal review 2022

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There may not be any reviews here now until January 2023 as we like to take a break - but our reviews will be back again in January.

Topics come and go in the popular science world - looking back over 2022, brains/consciousness, climate change, AI and space/cosmology have been the most dominant in terms of review titles. As someone with a particular interest in physics and maths, I'd love to see a few more of those next year. And chemistry remains the least covered of the core science subjects. 

A few years ago I speculated on why this was the case. Back then (2017) this site had 22 books under 'chemistry' as opposed to 97 maths, 126 biology and 182 physics. Admittedly, there is always a danger of editorial bias, but I have certainly never avoided chemistry titles if publishers sent them my way. They simply don't arrive. Publishers I spoke to at the time suggested that chemistry was, perhaps not 'sexy' enough.

Meanwhile we have seen some topics that don't get much coverage do well. I want to highlight Henry Gee's A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth, which recently (deservedly) won this year's Royal Society's book prize. I have to include a disclaimer that I count Henry as a friend - but then that's case with a good number of other UK-based science writers. It also points to the positive side of social media, which usually only gets bad press. I first 'met' Henry through a now long-defunct Nature initiative of setting up blogs on their website, which we both took part in (Henry also works for the publication). I think I've only met Henry twice in person, but our online interactions more than make up for this.

It's not, however, just chemistry that suffers in terms of exposure. This site covers popular science and science fiction books. I have written elsewhere how SF (and other genre fiction) is regarded as a poor cousin of literary fiction. Similarly, I'd suggest, popular science tends to be somewhat sidelined in the non-fiction world. My local independent bookshop has one shelf (not one bookcase) of popular science titles. Waterstones, the UK's biggest bookshop chain, seems to have subsumed popular science entirely into their vague 'smart thinking' section (at least in the store I go in most often). 

What's more, I noticed the other day that the respectable publisher OneWorld, which has a good science list, recently put out a 'Christmas Gift Guide' with a sole popular science contribution of Sean Carroll's interesting but hardly approachable Biggest Ideas in the Universe title. Don't listen to them! Popular science (and SF) books make great gifts.

I think part of the problem is that there is a view in the literary world that good books have to be hard going. Anything that smacks of being enjoyable - whether it's well written popular science or entertaining science fiction - takes second place to titles that are worthy. This particularly comes across when newspapers do a 'What I'm reading' thing. You know for certain that what the chosen celebrities will list are books that are considered challenging. Frankly, for me, whether it's fiction or non-fiction, I don't read to suffer, I read for enjoyment and interest. But that rarely seems to be a criterion in the literary world.

Luckily, though they may not often make the bestseller lists, excellent popular science and SF books continue to be produced. There was a time when it was suggested such 'midlist' books were dying out because everything would either be blockbusters or self-published to an audience of three. Thankfully, that has not happened, in part due to the translation market, as many good English language popular science books do well in other languages (and to some extent vice versa).

So I wish you a happy Christmas if you celebrate it, and a great New Year - and look forward to reading many excellent books in 2023.

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