Mike Kendall's Reading List

"Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve actually heard him talk: I was speaking at European AstroFest, giving a talk on comparisons between planets and Earth, and he gave a great talk on astrophysics, about detecting distant galaxies and other really interesting stuff. We felt this book was just really nicely written. In the first sentence he writes, “in the beginning, nearly 14 billion years ago, the entire universe was smaller than the period that ends this sentence.” He really has a good way of capturing the enormity of what you’re looking at. “Science should be fun, and we wanted books that get that across” The book has nice little digressions too, where he talks about the physics. So there’s a little bit about Newton and the impact that had and then there’s things about the oblateness of the Earth—in other words, it isn’t exactly spherical—and that you’re a little bit lighter at the equator than you are at the poles. So there are lots of little titbits throughout the book, but also a really nice narrative through what is current in astrophysics, what we know about the Big Bang and other questions. The book is very readable and we thought it would reach out to a lot of children. I learned something from these books! Definitely. Reading all these books was good for me. I suspect a number of these books we’ll be constantly going back to for facts. Keep it simple, it’s great."

"This one is fascinating. When I looked at it initially, I thought there is no way we’re going to get even close to shortlisting it, with its classic cats-as-a-hook. But when you start to read it, it’s really good. It really captures, for example, why the Earth has a magnetic field. It explains force and energy balances, the idea of electromagnetism. It’s really, really good, well explained science. And you’ve got the added fun of cats in it! As you said, one of the judges, for her children, it was the book they couldn’t put down; they would argue about who would take it to bed and read it. The other thing that was really compelling in this book was that some of the more traditional books are really science books. They’re going to appeal to a young student or child who’s already really interested in science. We wanted to try and have some books that might reach out to children who are maybe a bit intimidated by science or don’t think they’re very good at it, or perhaps just aren’t very interested in it. And we thought this book could do that: it would appeal to a much wider audience. I suspect it will do quite well."

"Like I said, we tried to pick books that were a little bit different. This is a really nice story. It’s about a young girl who’s feeling quite alone and a little bit detached and she finds comfort in music. Again, initially, I thought this was just too much of a story, that there wasn’t enough science in it and it didn’t get enough into the coding. But then, as the book progresses, you realize that she is also learning about scripting and coding. Towards the end, the book really is getting into the syntax and how you construct algorithms and how you logically solve a problem. The book does it in a really nice way and so we felt, again, that this was a book that would be very good for someone who’s perhaps intimidated by the idea of coding. It’s for someone who is thinking, ‘Well, I’m not very good with computers and coding is not something I look at.’ Then very naturally—through what I think is a really well told story—you learn about coding and you realize it’s logical, that there’s nothing really that threatening about it. You can make mistakes and it’s not the end of the world. I think for a lot of people it’s just about getting that confidence to start, especially with computers and especially for young women. There’s a stereotype that maybe they’re not so good at coding which is completely wrong and this book addresses that. Yes, and she’s also quite good at it."

"This book was the big hit in my family. Everybody put it as their number one. What’s nice about it is that it gives you some insights into how science evolves and works and very often it’s not somebody waking up one morning going, ‘I think I’m going to become a scientist and win a Nobel Prize.’ It’s often very accidental. Some of the big discoveries are opportunistic: it isn’t what somebody set out to do in the beginning. I think that’s really encouraging for young people, to see how scientists and scientific careers evolve and that there’s not one way to do this. Some of these people got Nobel prizes very late in life, some people quite early. Some people got them in disciplines that were a bit outside of what they were working on. Even Einstein: he was working in a patent office when he published his early papers on relativity. “We wanted to try and have some books that might reach out to children who are maybe a bit intimidated by science or don’t think they’re very good at it” The story is very nicely told, through the eyes of a young girl who meets Barry. By travelling through this special door, they get to meet Nobel laureates from the past. There’s also references to women like Rosalind Franklin, who probably deserves a Nobel Prize. So the book also points out some people who were overlooked. Then, another thing I really liked about this book is that at the end of each chapter there was a little experiment you could do that demonstrated aspects of what the Nobel Prize winners won the prize for. The one that really stuck with me is that just by melting chocolate in a microwave, you can actually work out the speed of light. These really basic things were really fascinating. And it’s very readable. It’s very well written. Again, when I picked this book up, I thought it’ll be okay, it won’t be great, but actually it was really, really good."

"Gut Garden , again, was a fascinating book. You’d have to be living under a rock right now not to realize that viruses and microbes are very important to us and can have good and bad effects. This is not my field, but I know we’re constantly learning more and more about these microbial communities both in our body and in nature and everywhere, really. They point out in the book that there’s orders of magnitude more microbes in our body than there even are cells: in a sense, we’re just a host for these microbes. It’s really nicely presented. It’s clever the way it goes through the roles that the microbes play: in digestion preserving food, in our health when things go wrong, how our body tries to counteract this. There are some really good facts, like how they can lie dormant for years. There are even some speculations about what your appendix might be used for. It’s really good and this is the type of book that 10 or 20 years ago you wouldn’t have been able to write, because we didn’t know a lot of this stuff. It’s a really fast-moving field, and this is not your typical science book. We all enjoyed it. We started with just over 100 and then I had to do a first cull. That was often books that just weren’t science or just 10 pages long and part of a series that’s just churned out like a conveyor belt. Then the judges were sent around 50 books and we had to get it down to six. We came up with our own shortlist of 12. Then we tried to see whether there was commonality and actually there was surprisingly little—which shows you, actually, how good these books were. It was really, really tough and there were so many of them where I thought, ‘Wow, this is a great book!’ Then we had long conversations. I think everybody had their mind changed—the book that they thought was a dead cert for not being shortlisted all of a sudden was shortlisted. We were all very open-minded and I really enjoyed the process. I thought it was great. I don’t know. I have children myself and they’re both studying science at university. They didn’t really start reading science books until they were in their teens. A combination of things: it’s what they enjoyed, it’s what they were naturally good at. I’m a scientist, my father was a scientist, their other grandfather was an engineer. They are not the type of people we are trying to aim the books at, they’re more for somebody who wouldn’t naturally be thinking about science. In fact, I’m always encouraging my children to read and write because I think that’s so important in science. I always say to my PhD students, ‘You can do some great work, but if you don’t write it up well and publish it, you might as well not have done it. It’s not going to help anybody.’ So, I think the communication of science is crucial—as important as doing the science itself. “I think the communication of science is crucial—as important as doing the science itself” In terms of books, sometimes it’s quite difficult to predict what a child will like. Often, children will be mesmerized by a book that when you look at it, there are a lot of facts. It’s not necessarily great pictures. It’s not necessarily a great format. But there’s something about it that’s compelling. Thinking of myself as a child, it was a series of books published by Time Life on everything to do with the natural world and physical sciences. I just found it really fascinating and would flip through it on the weekends. I think there are more, better books out there. There are also definitely some books with scientific flaws. There are also some books that aren’t making much of an effort to captivate people. But of the 100 or so we looked at I would say there were a great many that were excellent. Definitely."

"Yes, it’s called The Everyday Journey of Ordinary Things. This is something that used to—and still—fascinates me. I love it if there’s a show on TV about how something is made. There was one recently on yogurt, how it’s made and put in cartons. I just find the whole automation stuff fascinating. This book is really, really good. It’s got lots of interesting facts, and it’s explained really nicely. I’m just looking at a page here, “Where do clothes come from?” It’s the journey of a pair of jeans and there are little facts—like where the word denim comes from, ‘de Nîmes’ in France—and then the whole process, from growing the cotton right through to shipping it to shops. Sign up here for our newsletter featuring the best children’s and young adult books, as recommended by authors, teachers, librarians and, of course, kids. The book looks at how the internet or GPS work, how electricity works when you turn on your lights. The book is just raising awareness that everything we do, at any moment in our lives, has a big knock-on effect: somebody, somewhere in another part of the world has done something, has grown something, something has been burned to provide electricity. It gives us a better understanding of our context in the whole natural world which I think, often, even as adults we don’t fully appreciate. Here’s another one I like: “The journey of milk.” It sounds pretty straightforward, but actually it’s not, it’s very interesting. I also like the page on how you get fuel into your car. If you drive anywhere you need to have fuel, but it has an environmental impact. It’s much better to understand the whole problem. It was really pleasurable though. The Royal Society is so well organised. I’m really happy that they run this prize. I’d also like to thank my fellow judges—Cressida Cowell, Konnie Huq, Gail Eager and Rosalind Rickaby—for their hard work. Everything was done over Zoom, but we had a really good time chatting and arguing."