Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. This isn’t our weekly science news roundup, because this week we’re doing something different. Today’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s episodes will all celebrate the universal summer pastime of—you guessed it—reading.
Whether you’re lugging a tote full of long-neglected TBRs on your family vacation or squeezing in some audiobook listening time while enjoying a sunny walk around the block, now is the perfect time to crack open a book.
And that’s more true this summer than ever, because we here at Scientific American are hosting our first-ever summer reading challenge. Here’s how that works: head over to sciam.com/readingchallenge and download our official bingo card, then mark off the squares you fulfill with your various reading endeavors. Those challenges include things like reading a nonfiction graphic novel, reading a STEMinist romance and borrowing a book from the library, to name just a few. You can even use one book to hit multiple bingo squares!
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When you post a photo of your bingo card and tag us on social media, you’ll be eligible to win exclusive prizes. You can also e-mail us your entry directly if you prefer, but we’re looking forward to chatting with you about your favorite summer reads on Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky and LinkedIn, so don’t be shy!
Here to officially kick off our books takeover week is the mastermind behind the Scientific American Summer Reading Challenge, editor Bri Kane.
Bri Kane: There’s something special about the summer; I look forward to it all year and will keep certain books set aside to properly savor on the beach or while on a long train ride to visit my family. My beach bag always has at least one book in it, normally a new fiction book and a nonfiction option on a subject I really love.
This summer, I’ve been reading Sublimation, by Isabel J. Kim. It’s her debut novel, but she’s an award-winning short story writer, so I knew it was going to be good. I’ve been “buddy reading” it, which you may be wondering: What does that actually mean? Don’t worry, I’ll tell you. Buddy reading is essentially a private book club, just you and a friend or maybe a few, all reading the same book and chatting about it. My buddy is one of our SciAm staffers, Sarah, who is here to share some deets on the book. Hi, Sarah!
Sarah Lewin Fraiser: Hi, Bri! Sublimation is a story about a woman returning to her hometown in South Korea for a funeral, but there’s a twist—another version of her is already there. In this book crossing a border causes a person to split into two; one version remains behind, and the other continues into a new life. The book has lots of cool brief interludes with how this concept has intersected with legend, folklore and history.
I used to get in trouble for reading ahead—something that might be familiar to lots of our SciAm readers—but ultimately it’s been really cool to make our way through it together and discuss.
Kane: I highly recommend being a buddy and reading this one with us this summer.
Now, as you heard earlier, we are doing a bingo-style summer reading challenge. If you’re like me and can be a bit competitive, I strongly suggest finding a book or two that accomplishes a lot of challenge items, like This Vast Enterprise, by Craig Fehrman, or The Boundless Deep, by Richard Holmes. Both books offer a deep dive into the science figures you maybe only kind of remember from school: the explorers Lewis and Clark and the great poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. That’s number seven, 12 and 21 on our bingo card; if you read these outside this summer and find a nonfiction graphic novel, you’ve got bingo! Also, if you have recommendations for nonfiction graphic novels, please send them to us on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn or Bluesky!
If you’re looking for a short gut punch of a book to toss in your luggage, I’d suggest Eradication, by Jonathan Miles—long story short, well short story short since it’s less than 200 pages, it’s about a man who takes a job on an abandoned island and realizes way too late that the job is simply killing as many goats as he can. They’re an invasive species, and he’s there to stop the invasion in its little goat tracks. He really struggles with this task, the violence of it and the isolation he feels because, as far as he knows, he’s the only human there—I won’t spoil too much, but I read this on a plane and nearly burst into tears more than once. This one is the best ecohorror option for those of you getting closer to bingo!
The book I’m still telling all my friends about is David Haskell’s latest book, How Flowers Made Our World. I got to talk to him about his favorite flower story. Here is what he has to say.
David Haskell: Our fascination with aromas. We are like the mega voyeurs, if you like, of the natural world. Like, so think about a rose, right? People grow roses all over, and I love rose, kind of, perfume, and just the smell of rose is really beguiling.
We don’t eat roses. We’re not pollinators of roses. Roses evolved their aromas millions of years before humans even existed on this planet, mostly to speak to bumblebees and other insects. And yet we have constructed $100-million industries around extracting rose aromas, and people have devoted their whole lives to either creating these rosy aromas or, or figuring out how to grow them in the fields or to extract the aroma through distillation—in service of this plant [that’s] seemingly irrelevant to our survival and reproduction, right?
I mean, it’s obvious that we’re attracted to wheat and apples and potatoes ’cause, you know, they feed us, right? And that we’re attracted to the appearance and the aromas of other humans ’cause those are our friends and our family and our mates, and, and so on. But roses, really?
Kane: He was a delight to speak with, and this book is filled with floral fun facts I’m still bringing up at BBQs and picnics. Did you know that magnolias are millions of years old? Don’t even get me started on the number of variations of sunflowers there are! Haskell argues that flowers have greatly influenced our world; he makes the bold argument that grass actually domesticated fire.
Here is David again.
Haskell: To bring back native grasslands, the key thing you need to do is bring back fire because grasses for tens of millions of years have coevolved with fire. So a grass grows its body by slithering along the ground and sending up temporary leaves to photosynthesize, right? What we call the blades of grass that then later in the season catch fire. And that seems kind of crazy. Why would you burn yourself? Well, by burning the prairie to the ground, you’ve eliminated all the competition, uh, all the brambles and the trees and the saplings, and so on. They all got turned into fertilizer, and you as a grass have protected all your little growing stems because they’re buried in the soil, or they’re slithering along the top of the soil, and next spring you can leap back out.
And so I participated in some of the restoration of these native grasslands with these nonprofits that involved sowing grasses and some other wildflower seeds as well, but then, also, grassland professionals. And I, I’m not a prescribed fire professional, so I got to watch rather than actually participate—the pyromaniac part of me had to just be okay with that—and to see acres and acres of grassland all catch fire all at once, which is kind of terrifying, because these are really, really big burns, and it sounds like…. It’s this big rattling sound. It’s really, really loud.
Kane: Next up on my summer bingo card is some science-inspired poetry and maybe a hot and spicy STEMinist romance for this summer heat. What are you reading this summer? Read along with the whole SciAm staff by playing our summer book bingo and tell us what you’re reading using #SciAmSummerReading and #SciAmBookBingo. Happy reading!
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. Go to sciam.com/readingchallenge to play along!
If you’re looking at our reading challenge bingo card and wondering how the heck you’re supposed to find books to complete the grid, feel free to e-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com for some personalized recommendations. You can also ask us for suggestions on social media. But here are some rapid-fire suggestions direct from yours truly: For science-inspired poetry, I’d check out The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, by Molly McCully Brown, which is an award-winning collection set in the time when eugenics was a mainstream American science. The New York Times called it “part history lesson, part séance, part ode to dread.” And it’s one of my personal favorite poetry collections of the 21st century.
For a book reviewed by SciAm—with an author interview you can listen to—go read The Edge of Space-Time, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.
To check off the first book in a science-fiction series, go ahead and blast through a few of the Murderbot Diariesnovellas, by Martha Wells. For ecohorror, I have so many to recommend, but Sarah Gailey’s latest book, Make Me Better, is a recent favorite.
You can also pick up a copy of my audiobook, which I narrated myself, and which is technically written by someone underrepresented in science, though try harder; you can probably do better for that square. It’s called Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex—so, yes, it also checks off the science-focused history book square—and I’d love it if you got it using a library app like Hoopla or, [if] you want to support me by buying a copy, use the indie-bookshop-supporting app Libro.fm. Don’t forget to check off the “written by a scientist or science writer” square. And have I mentioned that my initials are absolutely on the periodic table, which is also a challenge square? Thank you very much, rutherfordium.
Okay, now that’s all for today’s episode for real. Tune in on Wednesday to hear me chat with Bri about some of our top reading recs for the summer. And don’t forget to go to sciam.com/readingchallenge for more info.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura. Marielle Issa and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Happy reading!