After a while, guidebooks and travel magazines all start to feel the same. While planning a trip, searching the internet for suggestions brings up the same tired results. Where is the book for the rest of us?

“And the world is full of wonderful sites, museums, and seemingly random places that make the geek heart pound a little harder.”

John Graham-Cumming, an admitted math nerd, has compiled a book of 128 different locations teeming with scientific and technological awesomeness for any nerd.

Why is this on our bookshelf?

If you proclaim that your book is “Geek something-or-another,” we like to eventually read it to see if you are right.

Rating (4 stars)

If you expect this book to include places like the memorial in Glenville, Ohio honoring the creators of Superman, or Hobbiton in New Zealand, or anything pop culture related, forget it.

This book is extremely nerdy, and therefor definitely deserves a place on my shelves, but I feel like if you are going to proclaim your “geekiness,” you must embrace all of geekdom. It is also way more serious than I would expect from a geeky book.

That aside, this is an awesome collection of science and tech locations, from little-known sites to major landmarks.

I was only able to make it to one of the locations in this book. (The Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, included in this book because it is home to Howard Hughes’s “Spruce Goose” which not only still holds the record for largest airplane wingspan but was also built almost entirely out of wood.) Despite that, this book is still great for armchair travel.

In addition to information about each location, it also includes interesting scientific explanations about a related topic. There are now many more places I want to visit. It is definitely worth browsing through this book and adding things to your travel list (or another site-seeing trip to your vacation.)