The brain behind XKCD explains various subjects—from how smartphones work to what the U.S. Constitution says—using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language and blueprint-style diagrams. It is a brilliant concept, because if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t really understand it. Munroe, who worked on robotics at NASA, is an ideal person to take it on. The book is filled with helpful explanations and drawings of everything from a dishwasher to a nuclear power plant. And Munroe’s jokes are laugh-out-loud funny. This is a wonderful guide for curious minds.

There’s a great book by Randall Munroe who is the creator of xkcd, that very science-oriented comic, and it’s called Up Goer Five. It’s a reference to the Saturn Five rocket that took the Apollo missions into space. What he is doing in that book is he explains all these very complicated concepts all the way from climate change to physical systems to submarines and so on, but he does it only using the 1000 most common words in the English language.