They say that we must read any books that give us pleasure, no matter how silly or weird the books are. Just to develop a habit of reading being a pleasurable experience.

I didn’t fully grasp this advice until I got to read “The Road to Reality” by the British mathematician R. Penrose.

just look at this monstrosity next to “normal” books

If you are unfamiliar with the book (which you probably are), it is a 1100-page-long mathematical physics book. If you make it through the first 350 pages of algebra, geometry, complex numbers and functions, hyperfunctions, tensors, differential equations, higher dimensions, manifolds, contour integrals, Lie algebras, and symmetry groups. Then. You have a chance of learning about spacetime, electromagnetic fields, quantum physics, gravity, special and general relativity, particle physics, thermodynamics, cosmology, and string, loop, and twistor theories described in terms of these math topics.

And I really got into it

I didn’t understand a lot, maybe 20%. But boy, did I enjoy it. First, it was a pleasure to learn that somebody does. And to go 1-2 levels deeper than the YouTube-level popular science (which gets repetitive very quickly). And, I was also weirdly captivated in the way a thriller would capture my attention. Does my universe survive by the end of the book? I wanted to keep reading to find out!

So yeah, incredible book, 10/10. 3-4 formulas per page, pure nerd pleasure (as we know, though, each formula in the book halves the number of readers, so this book probably has a Plank’s number of readers). Highly recommend to other nerds.

My takeaway is to read weird books more. I have tried to get the joy of reading for years from “normal” books, bestsellers, popular authors - and they just didn’t click. I think this is because there are only so many “normal books”, and it’s unlikely they will fit one’s taste. But weird books. There is always something for everyone.