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The Method: Your Winter Reading List

The decorations have been put away. The nights are long, and spring seems like a long way away. Now is a great time to chase away the winter blues with some good science books!

No, not those dense science textbooks from your school days. Books that bring the stories of science to life. As we close out 2015, Method host Brandon Hollingsworth and two previous guests suggest some great additions to your winter reading list.

Writer Margaret Lazarus Dean shares her love of Carrying the Fire, the 1974 autobiography of astronaut Michael Collins. The book has been praised as an extraordinary example of astronaut memoirs. Collins was the man who orbited the Moon on Apollo 11, as crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made history on the lunar surface. He writes about that flight, his role in history, and his life as a test pilot in the earliest days of the space age.

Lindsey Wainwright, educational outreach director for the McClung Museum, talks about A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. In that book, Bryson tells the story of scientific discovery, touching on astronomy, physics, archaeology and more. Wainwright says Bryson's style is accessible and enjoyable.

The Method host Brandon Hollingsworth shares one of his favorite books of any genre, Dava Sobel's Longitude. It tells the story of how we learned to navigate the seas, a revolution that helped lead us to the era of GPS and pinpoint mapping.