Earlier today, Amazon announced its picks for 2021’s Best Books of the Year So Far, including those within the science category.
Throughout the year, Amazon Books editors pore over thousands of pages to determine the Best Books of the Month, Best Books of the Year So Far, and Best Books of the Year, debating new releases across various categories.
How Amazon Books editors made their selections
In this interview, Amazon Books editor Al Woodworth explains how the Amazon Books editorial team makes its selections.
After curating titles released from January through June 2021, Amazon editors selected options to read by the pool or listen to on summer road trips, or to help readers who seek to better understand diverse experiences and cultures.
Here are the Top 20 picks of 2021 so far within the science category, as chosen by the Amazon Books editors.
- The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
- How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need
By Bill Gates
- Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
By Ethan Kross
- Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
- What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
- Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
- The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred
- A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds
- The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine
- Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear
By Carl L. Hart
- Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth
By Avi Loeb
- Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest
- The Premonition
- The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything
By Michio Kaku
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
- A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters
- Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer
- The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain
- Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters
- Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
By Adam Grant
For more coverage of the books featured on the Best Books of the Year So Far list, as well as insightful reviews on new books, author interviews, and hand-curated roundups in popular categories, visit the Amazon Book Review. You can also follow the Amazon Book editors’ recommendations and conversations on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.