Books: The crack cocaine of the literate classes.
This (stolen) quip captures with uncanny precision the way I relate to agglomerations of written words. I read compulsively and obsessively, to relax and to work, to exercise my mind and soul and to calm them. I'm currently partway through reading 5 books:
Sheaves in geometry and logic - Saunders MacLane and Ieke Moerdijk
The audacity of hope - Barack Obama
Surprised by hope - Tom Wright
Ethics - Baruch Spinoza
Conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics - Bernard D'Espagnat
This typical collection of books, together with the various papers and websites I'm reading my way through, takes a significant chunk of each day, but it is time I delight to give. The words I read connect me to people far removed in time and in space. When writing, they were able to carefully compose expositions of insights of a depth that we are too impatient to plumb in everyday conversation. By their radically different assumptions, they implicitly challenge the concepts that form the comfortable furniture of my worldview, undermining ideas that are so familiar they seem inevitable.
As I type this, I am sitting within 200 metres of one of the largest collections of books in the United Kingdom; the Cambridge University library. I find the thought of the shelves and shelves of books (over 5 million in all), most of which are filled with ideas and thoughts which will never have the chance to change me, impossible to capture. The simple awareness of it sucks away my mind like a sky filled with stars.
Of the many books I have read in the last few months, one stands out: 'The Road to Reality' by Roger Penrose. Penrose explains experimentally-based physics as it stands today, first laying the necessary mathematical foundations then swiftly assembling a structure which only just has sufficient rigidity to reach into the cloudy obscurity of general relativity and quantum field theory. Along the way he repeatedly points out subtle but illuminating perspectives on complex ideas. I was repeatedly left kicking myself over bits of mathematics that I thought I knew: 'Why did I never look at it like that? It's so obvious'. If you can get your hands on this book, and are prepared to fight to get through it, then you must read it.
I currently have a small stash of books sent to me by my relatives for my birthday, sitting in a knee-high pile on the floor of my room. I'll write a bit more about each of them here as I read them.
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