A physicist & a writer

I was thinking why I haven’t published anything on my blog when I have been writing in my private diary everyday. I believe it was fear of criticism.

A couple of weeks of writing just for myself and not for anyone else has brought my confidence back to life. Mainly because I realized that, in the beginning, I don’t have to know everything to be able to write, and that I have to start writing from what little I “do” know and keep learning while I am at it. This way I won’t lose my mind at least.

Also, it’s just a blog anyways.

Now about the books that I am reading.

I am reading David Zindell’s Neverness. Whenever I read a fantasy cum sci-fi I always think about Dan Simmons’s Hyperion series; about how alive it was, that it flowed through mystery, philosophy, imagery and science so beautifully.

Compared to Hyperion, Neverness is slow and over-speculative. The science element in it is wanting and the philosophy is not really that new (although well written). He has this entire section on Neanderthals that I found extremely boring and long. The hero is an epitome of Ayn Rand’s “Peter Keating” (I will have more to say on that later), or in casual terms, a wuss.

Nevertheless, Zindell is a profound writer and a good thinker. His descriptions are imaginative and novel. Only if his plot were a bit tighter and had some pace I would have enjoyed the novel more. But I haven’t finished it yet so I will refrain from making any further opinions.

I am also reading Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferson, a professor at St Michael’s College, Vermont. I found his book free on his site and is one of the best books on Introduction to Linear Algebra that I have ever come across! I don’t know why he hasn’t tried getting it published (or maybe he has and I just don’t know about it.)

Hefferson understands the lazy nature of his flippant audience who would read through a solution of a problem instead of actually solving it on a piece of paper and hence his examples and problems are easy, down to earth and effective in explaining the concept. I love reading the concepts and I love solving the problems!

(I wonder why practice is harder than understanding the concept. Maybe because “understanding” is done by the subconscious part of brain and is satisfactory even when it is vague and “practice” has to be done consciously; and anything done consciously is work and who wants to work? )

Here’s a link to his site just in case you are interested:

http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/

Three other non fiction, non mathematics books that I am reading right now are-

“Art of Non fiction” by Ayn Rand

“Elements of Style” by Strunk and White

“Francine Prose: Reading like a writer”

Art of Non Fiction is a usual Rand- authoritative, detailed, energizing and encouraging. Elements of Style, as thousands of readers have already attested, is like a bible for grammar and composition; and Reading like a writer is a book that I regret not reading before I picked up my first ever book 15 years ago. More about these books later.