The New Year is the ideal time to blow away the cobwebs and stimulate the brain with some scientific conundrums, history and method. You’ll find plenty to inform – and entertain in this month’s selection of the best in science writing, starting with the book I rated the best, Michael Brooks’ 13 Things that Don’t Make Sense: The Most Intriguing Scientific Mysteries of our Time from Profile – and it’s worth checking out the Profile list, they have a good number of topical science titles and in Michael Brooks they have found a top-flight science communicator.

This is not to say I didn’t enjoy my other selected titles, Poisons and Poisoning: A Compendium of Cases, Catastrophes and Crimes for example, a wonderful grab-bag of information on everything to do with poisons.

There will be plenty of science about next year as 2010 marks the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society and there are some major events planned, the BBC will mark 2010 as their Science Year, The Times will also be focusing on the subject and there’ll be a major science festival on the South Bank together with other literary and science festivals. As the editor of the major book on the history of the Royal Society, Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society from HarperPress, Bill Bryson will also be taking part in the celebrations.

The 2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books

So, to the winner of this year’s RSA Science prize, a quite superb book that would have been my choice too. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes -  an exceptional history perfectly conveying the excitement of scientific discovery. The other shortlisted titles included the fearless Ben Goldacre exposing fraudulent medical practice in Bad Science and Neil Shubin discovering the fossil remains of the 375-Million-Year-Old Ancestor he writes about in Your Inner Fish, proving that ancestral link with the latest scientific theories and research into DNA. Jo Marchant intrigues us with a scientific detective story in Decoding the Heavens, Avery Gilbert tackles our sense of smell in What the Nose Knows and Leonard Mlodinow reveals the influence of randomness in The Drunkards Walk.

Other Top Science Reads...

Adding in some other top science reads; The Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester the intriguing history of the world’s first geological map created by William Smith in 1815. An unusual approach to science with Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No 1 a tour of the Natural History Museum taking us behind the scenes introducing the people, the discoveries and the life at the museum and lastly for a scary look at the World without Us, Alan Weisman investigates how long it would take for every trace of the human race to disappear.