Thanks to everyone who submitted ideas for SciFri’s summer reading list. It was hard to create a final-15 roster out of the dozens of fascinating recommendations that you made. The titles we finally singled out were suggested more than once and/or struck our staff’s fancy.

Our list is just the tip of the iceberg, and we hope it leads you to even more great science writing discoveries. Let us know what you think. And tune in this Friday to hear more about the list, as well as to chat about our May book club pick, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.

Recent Non-fiction Favorites (from 2013 and 2012)
Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing, by Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers
A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss
Gulp. Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, by Mary Roach
Hallucinations, by Oliver Sacks
Letters to a Young Scientist, by E.O. Wilson

Classic Non-fiction Favorites
Animals Make Us Human, by Temple Grandin
The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes, by Peter Matthiessen
The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot
The Lives of a Cell, by Lewis Thomas

Favorite Science Fiction
Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
Dune, by Frank Herbert
The Mote in God’s Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart