27. Wild Card: How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

List Progress: 10/30

Sometimes you’ve just got to think way too hard about something silly. Randall Munroe, the creator of the long-running webcomic xkcd, is a very educated man who used to work for NASA as an engineer. He also has a clear interest in using his education to explore very silly things. How To is a lay-person science book about how to do normal everyday tasks in the most convoluted and “scientific” way possible. If you need to send a large file to someone far away, this book will let you know how many thousands of migrating butterflies you would need to attach microchips to in order to have all the data reach its destination. If you need to move houses, here’s how many rockets it would take to fly your current house to a new location. It’s all very fluffy and silly, but it does make the reader think about the world around them, which is more than a lot of books can say.

How To is written for a general audience, and actual scientists would likely scoff at how simply the explanations for complex scientific phenomena are presented. But reading the book, you get the impression that Munroe wants you to find at least one thing interesting enough that you decide to explore more. One can imagine this book, and Munroe’s work as a whole, grabbing a student’s interest and starting them down a whole new path of their life. The writing style is fun and irreverent and the comics used to explain concepts (as well as make jokes) keep everything moving at a nice clip. There is a lot of technical talk involved, but it rarely makes one’s eyes glaze over, and you get to feel quite smart when dwelling on something very, very silly.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.