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Yadvinder Malhi, Royal Society university research fellow, school of geosciences, University of Edinburgh

“I’m an avid reader, or at least I was until my son was born. Now I’m an opportunistic reader – buses, bathtubs, brushing my teeth,� says Malhi.

Surprises? “I often find good popular science books are as enlightening and relevant in informing my thinking and work as any academic text.� Although he now considers himself an ecologist, he trained as a physicist with no high-level education in biology, so “the rich detail in biology books is still a source of revelation�. Signs of Life by Ricard Sole and Brian Goodwin (Basic Books, 2000) inspires him by showing how counter-intuitive, large scale properties emerge from parts of a complex system.

The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and The Variety of Life by Colin Tudge (Oxford, 2000) are two books he loves dipping into.

To relax? Ben Okri’s In Arcadia (Orion, 2003): “Okri writes with a spiritual intensity that does it for me every time.�