Brandy Schillace's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Everything ends. We know that; we might even know that our world—this little blue-green planet—will end. But here’s the thing; the Universe had a beginning, and it will have an end, too. That’s just a fascinating and crazy thought; everything… ALL THE THINGS… started off for reasons we can scarcely understand, and will eventually close up shop. It sounds too big to contemplate, but guess what: today, right now, we can still “see” the dawn of the cosmos. It filters into our reality as a background noise, the ripple that flung out from creation itself, and science can measure it!

In fact, Katie Mack writes that physicists can explain the history of the universe from the first tiny fraction of a second until today. (You thought the dinosaurs were a long time ago? Imagine looking at the afterglow of the Big Bang… we CAN!) I invited Katie to join me on the Peculiar Book Club, a twice monthly YouTube livestream, to dig deeper into the past—and future—of the cosmos. She spoke live to the audience, answered questions, and did it all in language that made the ineffable accessible.

That’s enough to blow my tiny human mind, but it gets even better. Being able to see the beginning means that cosmologists can also speculate on the end. We now have the tools to extend our knowledge into the distant future and speculate about the ultimate fate of all reality. Will it be a “big crunch?” Will space pull apart until nothing remains? Will everything burn up—or perhaps suddenly cool off? Is it millions of years away? Or will it happen tomorrow? All this and more can be found in the pages of this fascinating book: The End of Everything.

Ed Yong PROBABLY needs no introduction–but just in case: he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller.

I was SO grateful to have him live on the Peculiar Book Club show for An Immense World. You don’t smell like a dog (I mean, of course, you don’t understand scent!) You don’t hear like a cat whose ears are still turned on, even in sleep. You can barely imagine the alien world of tiny leafhoppers, each blade of grass rising like a skyscraper. In this powerful book, Ed Yong allows us to perceive the sights, smells, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter bug mating rituals, turtles that track magnetic fields, fish that speak through electrical messages, and even humans who learn sonar, like bats (really!).

By tuning in to the senses of animals all around us to learn just how different the world really appears to diverse creatures. It feels as if we are seeing the world for the very first time, with all the beauty, novelty, and strangeness therein.

Imagine becoming mysteriously ill. Now imagine that this strange sickness has symptoms that don’t make sense: Hives, rashes, chronic fatigue—memory loss, digestive issues, arthritic symptoms—even seizures. Doctors ignore you. You’re told it’s all in your head. You spend a decade or more misdiagnoses (or without a diagnosis), watching your life turn upside down—only to discover the culprit was a tiny bug the size of a poppy seed.

In this book by Kris Newby, we learn the secret history of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons to discover that maybe—just maybe—our own government might be to blame. It reads like a riveting thriller, following the author’s own illness journey and diving into the mystery surrounding Lyme.

Did you know that Willy Burgdorfer, the man who “discovered” the microbe behind Lyme disease, also had a secret role in developing bug-borne biological weapons? This unacknowledged history raises terrifying questions about the epidemic of tick-borne diseases affecting millions of Americans today.