Need a good book for the holidays? We asked book blogger Dr George Aranda to nominate his top five science books published in the last year. With so many good reads it wasn't an easy task.

Each year I explore what's new and what's interesting in the world of popular science books for my blog, Science Book a Day.

Psychology and the brain are always areas of rich development. These include histories such as Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder by Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore, questions of diagnosis in ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic by Alan Schwarz and biographies such as Patient H.M.: A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets by Luke Dittrich.

Dinosaurs and the study of extinctions are always fascinating. Some good examples being Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction by Helen Pilcher, Weird Dinosaurs: The Strange new fossils challenging everything we thought we knew by John Pickrell and The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs by David Hone.

Technology and the future can provide hopeful or bleak visions of the future. Some examples include Big Data: Does Size Matter? by Timandra Harkness, Imagining the Future: Invisibility, Immortality and 40 Other Incredible Ideas by Simon Torok and Paul Holper and The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly.

I've gone with books that are of-the-moment or have sought to examine an explored a known topic from a different point of view.

Psychology

The Voices Within: The history and science of how we talk to ourselves by Charles Fernyhough

The idea of an inner voice is something we are used to living with. Is it our conscience? Is it the voice of significant people in our lives spurring us on or telling us we can't do it? How is it different from hearing voices which might have mental health connotations?

Psychologist and science writer Charles Fernyhough wrote the delightful Pieces of Light in 2012, exploring current ideas about memory. Leading the Hearing the Voice project, he takes us through how you study this phenomenon, its cultural history, the psychology and underlying neurophysiology of the inner voice.

This journey includes influences of our inner voice in education, how writers use it in their writing and going beyond what we might typically consider 'inner' voice asking questions like: Do deaf people have inner voices? The simple answer is 'yes', but like so many simple answers it leads to more and more questions. Fascinating stuff.

History

Einstein's Greatest Mistake: The life of a flawed genius by David Bodanis

Science writer and futurist David Bodanis wrote the successful E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation in 2002.

In this new book, Bodanis focuses on the great scientist's later years where he fell out of favour with his contemporary scientific community.

Einstein's career began brilliantly with his 1905 papers, but later on he second guessed himself, creating the cosmological constant to make his theory consistent with the evidence of an expanding universe of the time. However, this constant was not needed as later data agreed with his initial equations.

After this, Einstein would continue working with his intuition and ideas that were so valuable to him at the start of his career.

In this book, Bodanis proposes that Einstein's greatest mistake was not the constant, but his inability to shift his thinking to support the data of what would become the 'quantum age'.

While we now remember Einstein for his early success and have reinvented him as a meme with crazy hair and sticking his tongue out, the book reminds us to go beyond the cliché and remember the human — flawed, hubristic and alone — but no less the greatest genius of the modern age.

Biography

Women in Science — Rachel Ignotofsky

If you are keeping up with trends in science, education or their new acronym — STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), you will have heard that there is a lack of women taking up STEM careers. Some have attributed this to a lack of female career role-models. Well, this is the book to correct that imbalance.

Author/illustrator Rachel Ignotofsky has put together a beautiful collection of entries for 50 women in STEM. Each feature includes a lusciously stylised portrait of the woman with respective images from her field and a brief biography.

The women include those from the ancient to the modern world, including Hypatia, Mary Anning, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin, Patricia Bath and Katherine Johnson. While not all of these may be household names, they should be, and this is a great book for the science lover in your life to ensure that these women in science get the recognition they deserve and inspire a new generation of scientists.

Animals

Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? by Frans de Waal

What goes on in the minds of animals? What do they think? Are they conscious?

Questions like this have influenced the ways that we treat animals in our daily lives. Thankfully we no longer think that they are 'mindless automata' and we understand that animals need rich environments, affection and the ability to engage in a full range of activities unique to each species. Beyond this, we are making great strides into understanding how similar we are to animals with the rise of the Zoobiquity movement where human and animal ailments are being compared for mutual benefit.

In this book, Frans de Waal, a primatologist and ethologist, looks at the issue of animal intelligence and whether we as humans and scientists are conceptually equipped to understand their minds.

De Waal highlights problems in our testing, one example involved examining primates, where a banana was dropped outside their cages and they were provided with a stick to move the banana closer. Chimpanzees easily passed this test, but gibbons failed. Examining this test years later it was realised that gibbons have evolved quite differently to chimpanzees, with hands making it difficult to pick up a stick from a flat surface. When the test was re-designed they easily passed.

De Waal uses this and many other examples of animals behaviour across a number of species and concepts including social behaviour, time, and auditory communication.

He writes passionately, illuminating each new concept, and reflects on how science and the questions we ask are sometimes misaligned, true to the Heisenberg quote he begins with, that "What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

Hopefully we are beginning to ask the right questions.

Kids

The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Robots. Whether you call them drones or droids, whether they have wings, wheels or treads, whether they are autonomous or semi-autonomous — they are taking the world by storm.

Formerly the domain of industry and science fiction, this year many children around the world will be getting some form of robot under their Christmas tree. And stories are being written to explore the ideas of robots in our world.

Author and illustrator Peter Brown asks what happens when a robot is left on a remote island and activated by the island's animal inhabitants. How would it survive? What would it do? Roz the robot attempts to learn from the island's inhabitants and over time works out to how to take care of a gosling she is left with and find her way in the wilderness.

The book has a certain charm to it as Roz learns to communicate with the animals and is illustrated with black and white pictures that are bold and complex.

A thought-provoking novel perfect for children between 8-11 years of age.

Dr George Aranda teaches and conducts research in Science Education and Science Communication at Deakin University. He is interested in how blogs, narrative and books can be used to promote science engagement. He is the curator of Science Book a Day, and runs the Big Ideas Book Club in Melbourne. He can be found on Twitter: @popsciguyoz