All books may be created equal, but some are more equal than others. In case you weren’t obsessively perusing the nonfiction racks in 2012, here is an alphabetically-ordered round-up of the year’s best titles for geeks of all flavors.
A quirky bit of history that few people know: the story of a farmer who decided to be a secret agent and inexplicably ended up saving the world.
[Agent Garbo: The Brilliant, Eccentric Secret Agent Who Tricked Hitler and Saved D-Day]
Forty years’ worth of beloved and iconic game graphics, curated by Smithsonian American Art Museum as a companion book to their exhibit of the same name.
[The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect]
An examination of chaos in real-life situations — and how disorder and stress create strength in everything from biology to society — from the author of The Black Swan.
[Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder]
A serious-but-funny discussion of un-serious movies, from the creators of comedyfilmnerds.com.
[The Comedy Film Nerds Guide to Movies]
A bold quest to discover the biological mechanism of creating personal identity, personality and intelligence, with a look at future developments that may help us map the processes. Super-geeky, totally worth it.
[Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are]
A biographical tour of the tools we use to eat and cook, from prehistory to 2012. Exponentially more fascinating than you’d expect.
[Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat]
Vitruvian Manis one of history’s most famous images, and yet little is known about it. Lester examines the impact of da Vinci’s iconic image from 1420 into modern times.
[Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession, and How Leonardo Created the World in His Own Image]
Think you’re too old to learn to play? 38-year-old research psychologist Gary Marcus took on the task; he learned to play, and quite a bit about the cognitive processes of becoming musical.
[Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning]
Word nerds: You need to read this book. That is all.
[The Horologicon: A Day’s Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language]
Futurist and probably-crazy person Ray Kurzweil takes a look at reverse engineering the human brain. Mind=blown.
[How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought]
From Gutenberg to Garamond, the story of how we all became typeface-obsessed Comic Sans-haters.
[Just My Type: A Book About Fonts]
Astronomer Dimitar Sasselov’s speculative look at life elsewhere, how we might find it, and some examples of the weird biochemistry that might support it. (Crazy-good. Swearsies.)
Well over a hundred illustrations from the LotR trilogy’s conceptual designer, with info about and inspiration for his Oscar-winning work on the films.
[The Lord of the Rings Sketchbook]
Who says games are a waste of time? A history of gaming and how we have used it to practice strategy and critical thinking for real life.
A seemingly-random but addictive collection of fascinating info, at-home experiments (test the speed of light in your own kitchen!) and novels ways of explaining complicated scientific concepts. (Loved this so much — try it out.)
“Getting a taste for the Bard” is this book’s subtitle, which kind of explains it all: Shakespeare demystified and made accessible.
Ignore the fact that this book gets crazy hype — thanks to Silver’s weirdly accurate election predictions — and appreciate the science and math at play here. It’s a thing of beauty.
[The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t]
There’s a lot to say about this book, but I’ll stick with the obvious: NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON.
[Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier]
This was one of the best books I read all year. Here’s the first chapter. Do yourselves a favor and read the rest, too.
[The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code]
Maybe don’t read this if you’re vegan: once you have some idea of how a plant’s sensory system works, there’ll be no food left for you. The rest of us will just try to keep off the grass a little more often.
[What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses]
There’s no way to list the entire catalog of nonfiction books that came out this year. I loved these, but you’ve probably read stuff that I didn’t. So what was your favorite new nonfic title? Let us know in the comments so we can check those out, too!
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