Sam Leith: The book that I’ve found myself telling other people about most has been Through The Language Glass, Guy Deutscher’s gripping pop-science book about linguistics and neuropsychology, describing how language shapes our perception of reality.
I also hope people look at the handsomely produced A Hedonist’s Guide to Art. I must confess an interest: I’ve contributed a couple of essays and it’s edited by a friend, Laura K. Jones. But it’s highly original, and stuffed with fascinating gobbets from contributors as diverse as Brian Sewell, Will Self, Gilbert & George and Genesis P. Orridge.
Lewis Jones: Chasing the Sun tells non-scientists all they might want to know about the sun, and scientists much that they probably did not know. Richard Cohen supplies plenty of dizzying figures — the sun is 32,000 light years from the centre of its galaxy of a hundred billion stars, and so on — but also considers our star from such perspectives as the mythological, literary and musical.
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