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Excellent. Top pick!

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I absolutely LOVED Bill Bryson’s a short history of everything - he manages to make the most complicated science easy to really understand, be completely fascinating, and incredibly funny at the same time.

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I love Bill Bryson! He's occasionally made me feel hopeful against my will.

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21 hrs agoLiked by Picking the best-written books

As someone who once had the chutzpah to enter the Royal Society's Science Prize- with a poetic anti-Darwin tracing of the history of inspiration (Involution... I know, not science in 2013) this extract from Bill Bryson's Everything, gives real hope. Certainly elegantly economical prose, but, more importantly, somewhat irreverent. A crack in the straight face. Almost a delighted smile. It's a start.

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'A crack in the straight face.'

And someday all nonfiction writers will face a well-deserved lynching if they don't have this.

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22 hrs agoLiked by picking the best-written books

loved Bill Bryson’s “At Home” with strange passion, -some books, I love more intimately, as if they were written for me only; and these, I tend to keep silent about, as if hiding them jealously, it makes no sense, I know . Other books though, I love so much I indeed can’t stop blabbering about them; I want so to share I become ridiculous; it’s some other kind of love. You want to read it aloud when you read. That’s what happenned with “At Home”.

I knew Bryson is an author of several more bestsellers, but I gave myself some time before I read some of them. It’s like I wanted to keep to my joy from ‘At Home” for longer.

Your post makes me think I might be ready.

Thank you-and thank you for the rest of the list, of course.

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Thanks, Chen.

One blessed day science writers will be forced at gunpoint to take the care over their sentences that Bryson does.

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