100 Books Like Never Home Alone

This is the best novel I’ve read about bubonic plague.

Student historian Kivrin travels back in time to England of the Middle Ages—unknowingly at the start of the Black Death. The cause of Black Death was the plague bacteria, unknown to people of that time.

What makes the book memorable is its depiction of everyday life, where children who get lost in the forest must find their way home by the tolling of the village church bell. Ultimately, the bell tolls for all the plague’s victims.

The vivid characterization makes me experience people of a time so distant their minds feel alien to us, yet still deeply human.

What if reproduction required people to mate with another species—creatures more alien than bacteria?

In this book, Lilith Iyapo awakes after a nuclear war to find her alien saviors expect just that. The alien Oankali are organisms whose cells modify their own genes to perfection. But their genes run short of diversity, until they are compelled to share genes with a population as alien to them as—humans.

This disturbing novel asks us how much of our own humanity would we trade for survival? Would I welcome a half-alien child if its monstrous traits cured cancer? A science fiction novel that made me imagine the biological dilemmas of gene exchange.

Besides microbes, what other kind of minds could be alien to ours—yet communicate with us?

In this book, a lonely woman, Tova, who cleans aquariums, finds an escaping octopus named Marcellus. The octopus reveals his own personality, his longing for diverse fare such as cockles and abalone, and above all, his determination to return to the sea. Trying to help each other, Tova and the octopus embark on various adventures until each finds a surprising reward.

This unusual friendship of human and sea creature offered me a unique experience that will stay with me long after reading.

The old saying that you can “feel it in your gut” is true. Our gut microbiome (community of microbes) is part of our brain!

Our own bacteria tell us to eat sugar so they can digest it. Bacteria in our intestines make our neurotransmitters that prevent depression and Parkinsonism. They make short-chain fatty acids that strengthen our immune system and endocrine organs.

Now, doctors are developing “psychobiotic” microbes like Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus to treat anxiety and other disorders. This research inspired my science fiction about microbial aliens in the brain.

Thomas captured the beauty and mystery of nature and science—how billions of cells in our body work intricately together to form tissues and organs that make us breathe, move, see, think, and fight infections, and how the world itself is analogous to one big cell.

I was amazed to understand the extraordinary complexities of Nature—how ants plan, communicate, and build farms, how our noses smell, how our eyes see and communicate to our brains, and how we hear and appreciate music.

People need less Dawkins in their lives and more Lewontin, whose thought-provoking, accessible writing about evolutionary biology stands in fierce opposition to the trend toward genetic determinism that seems to be the rage nowadays. We are not simply our genes, Lewontin says, because the effects DNA has on our lives are mediated by social and environmental factors, many of which we can influence. While it’s nominally about biology, I also read this as a critique of causal inference, generally. What we consider a “cause” reveals our ideological commitments to certain aspects of the world being maintained, and we should be careful what causal lessons we draw from data.

The traditional neo-Darwinian view of evolution understands inheritance in genetic terms, as the transmission of DNA from parents to offspring. Jablonka and Lamb argue convincingly that in addition to genetic inheritance, there exist three other inheritance systems in nature – epigenetic, symbolic, and behavioural – all of which play an important role in evolution. The book is not a work of philosophy in the strict sense, but rather a fascinating and conceptually-rich synthesis of a diverse body of empirical findings which, the authors argue, can only be accommodated by going beyond a purely geno-centric view of evolution.

This book is an engaging treatment of philosophical issues in biology, with a strong though not exclusive focus on evolution. Written by two leading practitioners, the book continues to be an excellent entry point into the subject despite being more than 20 years old. For any reader of my own book who wants more detail, Sterelny and Griffiths’ text is ideal. Chock full of real-life examples, the book offers an excellent model of how philosophy can engage with biology. Topics discussed include function and adaptation, reductionism, levels of selection, the “selfish gene” theory, and more. 

This is the best scientific novel I have ever read. The story is fiction (not 'science fiction' in the sense of fantasy, but a story that could easily take place in the real world right now), but its portrayal of how science is done, by a bunch of completely believable characters, is really true-to-life. It's a great way for young people considering a research career to taste what they are really like, and a great way for everyone to ask why we do science the way we do, while enjoying a well-paced multi-layer story, that is written with real wit. [Declaration for transparency: I know the author as a scientific collaborator, but this is nothing to do with my recommendation of her fiction]. 

Mark Denny manages to explain much of biology by analyzing the physical properties of just two substances: air and water.

I love how he progresses through seemingly mundane concepts—density, viscosity, heat capacity, surface tension—and uses them to unravel how biology works. My favorite feature of the book is when Denny applies simple physics and engineering principles to explain the inner workings of oddball organisms.

All I can say about his book is that I wish I had written it.