I’ve decided to keep a weekly journal, published every Sunday, to get me into the habit of writing regularly and semi-publicly. If I come up with any worthwhile ideas here I’ll flesh them out into blog posts on my Substack, but these journal entries will likely not be of much interest to others. I don’t intend for these entries to be that personal in the sense of containing biographical information about myself—instead, they will be more like a research diary of what I’m reading and thinking about.

What I’ve been reading

The year before last, a friend mentioned that they have a personal ritual of reading ten pages every morning while having their coffee. I thought this was a great idea, and have done the same ever since (though I don’t always read in the morning, and never while eating breakfast). Ten pages is just the minimum requirement—I often read more. I’ve kept a log of what I read each day here.

I haven’t decided how—or even whether—to take notes on what I read yet. Taking notes while reading turns it into a chore, I can look up anything I want online without having to search through personal notes, and it’s not like there’s anything I could say about a book that hasn’t been said by others a thousand times. Writing a short note after reading each day is a possibility, but again, what would be the point? Really, when I think about it, my main motivation for taking notes is just to have “proof” that I read the book at all.

On Friday I finished reading Gene Wolfe’s Sword and Citadel, the final volume of his The Book of the New Sun series. It was fantastic, and I will have to reread it at some point, as it’s one of those series that was carefully planned from the beginning and contains numerous passages that only make sense in light of information that you obtain in later books.

I read The Book of the New Sun because I read Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series last year, and she cites it as one of her major influences. (Coincidentally, Ada Palmer wrote the foreword for the two-volume Tor edition of the Book of the New Sun that I read.) Terra Ignota was probably the best thing I read last year, along with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquez, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, and The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer (a reread for me). I’m thankful that I reread Homer, since Terra Ignota is very heavily influenced by them.

The worst books I read last year were The Rose Field by Philip Pullman and The Martian by Andy Weir. The Rose Field was the final book in Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy, and it was all the more disappointing because the previous book, The Secret Commonwealth, was incredible. He just couldn’t tie together any of the plot lines and it all fell apart by the end. The only consolation is that Pullman is still an incredible writer and there are many worthwhile moments of beauty along the way.

The Martian was the only book I bought on a vacation with me, so I was forced to finish it. Andy Weir has the writing ability of a below-average teenage fanfic author. The plot is incredibly bare-bones and predictable, something you could come up with in an hour. There is no difference between any of the characters—they all speak and think in the same annoying smart-alecky way, and none of them have real, believable reactions to events. Whether everything is fine or they think the main character is about to die, they all crack jokes and have no notable emotional reaction beyond, e.g., a perfunctory mention that someone isn’t sleeping well. Even the way Weir constructs sentences irritates me. It is mystifying to me that anyone agreed to publish this book.

On Saturday I started reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula—after having watched so many adaptations recently, it only seems prudent to read the original.

What I’ve been studying

Nothing, at the moment. I have a plan for returning to math and physics that is probably too ambitious and which I won’t get around to for years, if ever. The plan is to work through the following math textbooks:

• Hartshorne, Geometry: Euclid and Beyond,
• Cheng, The Joy of Abstraction,
• Lawvere and Schanuel, Conceptual Mathematics,
• Aluffi, Algebra: Chapter 0,
• Munkres, Topology, and
• Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

Alongside those, I would work on the following physics textbooks:

• Feynman, Lectures on Physics,
• Young and Freedman, University Physics,
• Goldstein, Classical Mechanics,
• Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics,
• Cohen-Tannoudji, Quantum Mechanics,
• Reif, Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics, and
• Taylor and Wheeler, Spacetime Physics.

Most of the physics books are what I used in college, but otherwise I’ve gotten recommendations from John Baez’s How to Learn Math and Physics, among other places. In addition to math and physics, I am also interested in music theory and composition, computer science. ❦