this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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oo, thanks! I'll definitely add it to my list 📝
I started just reading whatever books were showing up when watching episodes of Lost, I remember Turn of the Screw was one of the books Desmond Hume was reading in the bunker, along with The Third Policeman. The latter book reminds me of Pynchon and other postmodern literature, it's quite surreal and I quite enjoy the way that book is simultaneously extremely detailed and realistic but entirely fantastical, as if describing a new impossible physics through mundane experiences in a radically different world (all while capturing kind of psychological realism that simulates psychosis or something). Anyway, I like books like that.
EDIT: oh oh oh, btw I love your username and I feel compelled to share in case you happen to not already know, the person who popularized Spivak pronouns was a mathematician emself who wrote an excellent text on calculus.
Oh, yeah, I actually already knew about the Spivak pronouns! That's partly why I chose them for myself on here. And also because I like them.
But yeah, Spivak is great! My geometry/topology course my first year of grad school had us working out of Spivak's "A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry". In hindsight, a very tough book to learn from, rather old-fashioned, but my professor was like a billion years old, so it makes sense he would choose an old book!
that makes sense, I just had to share on the improbability that you didn't already know 😅
and that's awesome - I'm so jealous, I would have loved to have taken a topology course let alone a graduate level topology course 😭
I do remember Spivak's writing being poor pedagogy but succinct and elegant, it does seem like some kinds of mathematicians are like this but it's inaccessible and leaves too much work for the reader, esp. students. I always felt like an outsider that way in math, like my brain just didn't work the way everyone else's did. I really enjoyed Morris Kline's Mathematics for the Nonmathematician, placing math in its larger humanistic context was really compelling and I found it made me much more invested in learning and understanding the math.
And Paul Lockhart's Mathematician's Lament, Measurement, and Arithmetic have radically changed the way I view and interact with mathematics and has been really helpful for me.
Oh, here's a question! Have you ever read any Phillip K Dick? He's weird and surreal in a way I really enjoy. The one thing I do not like about Dick, however, is he's a misogynist. It's not terrible, in the sense that he's not writing books that revolve around gender conflicts, but there's that underlying misogyny that's so, so pervasive in older works by male authors.
If you want to give him a try, I'd start with Ubik and then probably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Those are probably my favorite Phillip K Dick books.
Misogyny is rather common unfortunately (I mentioned in another comment reading Bukowski who is almost proudly misogynistic), but I've read American Psycho (one of the few books I really don't think I should have read) and probably too much of de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, so let's just say my brain is probably rotted enough for anything at this point.
I did start Dick's Man in the High Castle and while I really want to like Philip K. Dick because he fits my interests thematically, I've never been able to get into any of his writing (so far anyway), so I probably do need a little encouragement - I've long wanted to read Ubik, thank you.
Haha, it's nowhere near as bad as American Psycho or de Sade, more on the level of Asimov, who I see you enjoy in another comment, so you should be good, misogyny-wise. I just like to say it, you know? Especially in a women's space like this, it feels worth pointing out when books have that background-radiation misogyny that so many of them do.
I'd try Ubik, if I were you, it's really, really good. I found it a complete page-turner, I literally couldn't put it down.