On the Nature of Things
55 BC · 304 pages
Everything is atoms falling through empty space, Lucretius argues in Latin verse, your soul included, and it dies when your body does. He wrote the poem to cure his readers of fearing death.
★ 7.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Early Greek Philosophy
Various and Jonathan Barnes
500 BC · 282 pages
Heraclitus said you cannot step into the same river twice. Parmenides said nothing changes at all. Before Socrates, Greek thinkers asked what the world is made of and answered without appeal to gods.
★ 6.9
Cosmos
1980 · 432 pages
Sagan moves from the Big Bang to the Library of Alexandria to the carbon in your body, forged inside dying stars. No science book written in English had ever sold so well.
★ 6.4
A Brief History of Time
1988 · 248 pages
Twenty-five million people bought a physics book. Hawking explains black holes, the arrow of time, and whether the universe needed a beginning, carrying the argument on almost no mathematics at all.
★ 4.8
One, Two, Three ... Infinity
1947 · 340 pages
Gamow carries a reader from counting to infinity, from atoms to the expanding universe, drawing every illustration himself. The psychologist Steven Pinker traces his science writing to reading this as a boy.
★ 4.6