Recently finished:
I also have the 2018 Observer's Handbook from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on the go, and am gradually expanding my knowledge of the field thanks to many short essays in the book. Yesterday I learned why it's important to set up a telescope a couple of hours before you want to use it (it needs to adjust to the outside air temperature to prevent thermal currents messing up the image), how to align an equatorial mount for tracking stars, and that there's such a thing as "astronomical twilight" (night, and a truly dark sky, doesn't happen until the geometric centre of the sun is 18° below the horizon).
- Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (mentioned above by downbeatplumb)
- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (Penguin Classics, translation by Martin Hammond).
- The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Not recommended -- it starts out with an interesting hypothesis about why we resist doing important work, but ends up doing an epic face-plant into a pile of spiritual woo-woo.
I also have the 2018 Observer's Handbook from the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on the go, and am gradually expanding my knowledge of the field thanks to many short essays in the book. Yesterday I learned why it's important to set up a telescope a couple of hours before you want to use it (it needs to adjust to the outside air temperature to prevent thermal currents messing up the image), how to align an equatorial mount for tracking stars, and that there's such a thing as "astronomical twilight" (night, and a truly dark sky, doesn't happen until the geometric centre of the sun is 18° below the horizon).
