Regions

My apologies for being late to the party. I could plead that I missed the bus, thinking – mistakenly, as it turned out – that it went to the station, but I shall not plumb that particular chthonos. I shall instead hold my head high, present my apologies and quip that whereas I might be late, I am at least not as late as the Late King George VI.

But I digress.

Examining as I was the nether regions of my output in this parish and parts adjacent for the purposes of celebrating a year’s worth of fun and frolics here at OT (see the erumpent eructations from my noble colleagues here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and, notwithstanding inasmuch as which, here, for details: concessions available, closed Wednesdays); wondering how best to commemorate such an occasion; and assessing the several eldritch effluvia emanating from my preternaturally gorgonopsian output; I decided not to dwell too much on the year past, but, in solstitial mood [Oi! Get on with it or Professor Trellis will have eaten all the mince pies - Ed] exumbrate a program for the next.

The past, as has been said, is another country. It is said that when Winston Churchill looked at his own past, sometime around 1941, he found that it fell into two distinct phases. He explored this before an audience of Free French, giving his address, against advice, in French. Quand je regarde mon derrière, quoth the greatest wartime leader in our nation’s history, je vois qu’il est divisé en deux parts. And who among us, friends, could honestly say any differently, were we our own selves; Winston Churchill; nay, even Boris Johnson, whom posterity will mark to have been the Greatest Statesman Of This Or Any Other Age(TM)?

Let us, then, leave the past to posterior posterity. But soft – scanning the long list of posts I’ve added to the canon, like stout Cortez and all his men, silent upon a peak in Darien, I noticed that one (1) post had accreted more comments than any other.

No, it was not an invitation to add a witty caption to animal antics pictured here at the now vastly extended Maison des Girrafes.

An animal, recently.

Neither was it an unintentionally funny, curious or downright bizarre entry to the occasional series entitled ‘It Has Not Escaped Our Notice’, a rubric that nods wittily to a line in perhaps the single most notorious paper ever to have appeared in Your Favourite Professional Weekly Science Magazine Beginning With N – a line which we editors have ruthlessly expunged, expurgated, annihilated – even, I daresay, flensed – from every paper since, with a single exception (the first person to name the original and the exception will be infiltrated into the Grand Order of the Unicycling Girrafe.)

No, it was this post, in which I offered my suggestions for a Popular Science Reading List That No Self-Respecting Occam’s Typewriter Should Leave Home Without Ending Their Sentence In A Preposition. You both kindly added your suggestions. So what I have done here to collate, gather, arrange, list and corral them all, or at least mostly, in thesauristic fashion, adding one or two new ones of which I have thought since, and so on and so forth. I haven’t added links to any online book repositories, as I guess you are equipped sufficiently for such tasks on your own account (hint: it’s behind the Grassy Knoll, underneath the Lone Gunman.) And, anyway, it would take too long. However, the festive season being almost upon us, I hope you won’t object to a small reminder of my own furrows ploughed in this vein.

So, here goes (clears throat, adjusts cummerbund.) The following list contains books that I have read; books of which I have heard good things but have not read myself; and books you recommended in the comments thread to the original posting.

Adams, Douglas - Last Chance to See
Alexander, W. and Arthur Street – Metals in the Service of Man
Appel, Toby – The Geoffroy-Cuvier Debate 
Barrow, John D. – Impossibility
Ball, Philip – H2O, a Biography of Water
Berreby, David – Us and Them
Brown, Andrew – J. D. Bernal: The Sage of Science
Bryson, Bill – A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carwardine, M. and Stephen Fry – Last Chance to See (update on Douglas Adams)
Chalmers, A. F. – What Is This Thing Called Science?
Cohen, Jack and Ian Stuart – Figments of Reality
Conway Morris, Simon – The Crucible of Creation
Dennett, Daniel – Consciousness Explained
Dennett, Daniel – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
Desmond, Adrian – The Devil’s Disciple
Desmond, Adrian and John Moore – Darwin
Diamond, Jared – Collapse
Diamond, Jared – The Rise And Fall of the Third Chimpanzee
Diamond, John – Snake Oil
Falk, Dean – The Fossil Chronicles
Fara, Patricia – Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks
Ferry, Georgina – Dorothy Hodgkin, A Life
Feynman, Richard – Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman?
Feynman, Richard – The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
Feynman, Richard – What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Fortey, Richard – Survivors
Fortey, Richard – Dry Store Room #1
Fortey, Richard – Earth, an Unauthorized Biography
Gleick, James – Chaos
Gleick, James – Newton
Goldacre, Ben – Bad Science
Gopnick, Alison M. et al., – The Scientist In The Crib
Gordon, J. E. – The New Science of Strong Materials 
Gould, Stephen Jay – Wonderful Life
Gribbin, John – In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat
Gribbin, John – Science: A History 1543 – 2001
Gribbin, John and Mary – He Knew He Was Right
Guthrie, Dale – Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe
Hall, Stephen S. - Invisible Frontiers: the race to synthesize a human gene
Heinrich, Bernd - Why We Run
Heinrich, Bernd - Winter World
Heinrich, Bernd – Mind of the Raven
Hofstadter, Douglas – Gödel, Escher, Bach
Ingram, Jay - Talk, Talk, Talk: Decoding the Mysteries of Speech
Ingram, Jay – The Science of Everyday Life
Ingram, Jay – The Velocity of Honey: And More Science of Everyday Life
Ingram, Jay - The Burning House: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Brain
King-Hele, Desmond – Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement
Lovelock, James – The Vanishing Face of Gaia
Maddox, Brenda – Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA
Morton, Oliver – Mapping Mars
Mukherjee, Siddharta – The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Named, He Who Must Not Be – The Selfish Gene
Named, He Who Must Not Be – Climbing Mount Improbable
Named, He Who Must Not Be – The Greatest Show On Earth
Oparin, A. I. – The Origin of Life
Pinker, Steven – The Language Instinct
Pinker, Stephen – The Blank Slate
Pinker, Stephen – The New One About Violence Whose Name Escapes Me
Rackham, Oliver - The History of the Countryside
Reisner, Mark - Cadillac Desert
Sacks, Oliver – The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Sacks, Oliver – Uncle Tungsten
Sacks, Oliver – The Island Of The Color-Blind
Sagan, Carl – The Demon-Haunted World
Sagan, Carl – The Cosmic Connection
Sagan, Carl – Pale Blue Dot
Sapolsky, Robert – A Primate’s Memoir
Schama, Simon - Landscape and Memory
Singh, Simon – Fermat’s Last Theorem
Stringer, Chris – The Origin Of Our Species
Skloot, Rebecca – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Sobel, Dava – Galileo’s Daughter
Sobel, Dava – Longitude
Spinar, Z. and Burian, Z. – Life Before Man
Stevenson, Mark – An Optimist’s Tour of the Future
Thomas, A. E. – Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800
Watson, James D. – The Double Helix
Wade, Nicholas - The Nobel Duel 
Wilkins, Maurice – The Third Man of the Double Helix
Williams, Terry Tempest - Refuge
Zimmer, Carl – Parasite Rex
Zimmer, Carl – Soul Made Flesh
Zimmer, Carl – Evolution

In the Town Hall, if wet.