Second paragraph of third section of first chapter:

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to tracings and curves You are familiar — if you are at all the sort of reader I like — with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper you cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six long folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called “smoothed curves” set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae — and things like that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the suspicion but that the author does not understand it either. But really you know many of these scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well: it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

A H.G. Wells book that I had never read, or even really heard of. A scientist carelessly develops a food that causes rapid growth in both animals and plants; the experimental farm that he sets up is overrun with gigantic vermin (in scenes satirising middle-class life); twenty years later, there is a reckoning between the giant human children who have emerged, enlarged in body and mind, from exposure to the new food, and the rulers (for now) of England. It's pretty short and makes its points very clearly. I'm surprised that it is not better known. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2019, my top unread sf book and my top unread book by H.G. Wells. I'm stripping Wells off into a separate reading stream, so the next books in each of those piles respectively are The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi, Greybeard by Brian Aldiss and In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells.