Yes, You Can and Will Understand Stephen Hawking’s Books. That Was the Whole Point.

One year ago, Stephen Hawking died, leaving behind a litany of books, lectures, publications, instances of self-deprecation, and Simpsons cameos that made black holes and physics much, much cooler than they were before.

The global hotshot and genius thinker gave us the ever-popular A Brief History of Time, from which came many offshoots like its illustrated version, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, the Universe in a Nutshell, and of course A Briefer History of Time. If you’ve been holding off on diving into an accessible lesson about the cosmos, this is a good time to give it a shot.

And if you’re curious to learn more about the man who once threw a party for time travelers, biographies about him abound, from Kitty Ferguson’s An Unfettered Mind to Kristine Larsen’s A Biography. The 2014 movie The Theory of Everything is based on his wife Jane Hawking’s memoir Travelling to Infinity: The True Story Behind The Theory of Everything — another great choice.

“When history looks back on Stephen Hawking, it will remember his as one of the greatest minds of modern times,” Jamie Ross wrote for the Daily Beast last year. “Like Isaac Newton is remembered for discovering gravity, and Albert Einstein for the theory of relativity, school kids will be taught that Hawking was the physicist who discovered more about black holes than anyone else.”

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