Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog

I. The Nine Planets

The first time I experienced a sense of wonder was upon arriving home from the Franklin Township Public Library and tearing into the book I’d just checked out: a nonfiction astronomy by Franklyn M. Branley titled The Nine Planets. I was still learning to read, and I can clearly recall wondering if reading was worth the struggle. The Nine Planets made it worth the struggle. Here was a book that described the solar system with its nine planets1. They were astonishingly far away. Some of them had more than one moon! Saturn had rings around it! This was my first conscious encounter with the universe beyond Earth’s atmosphere and the feeling of wonder it manifested within me I still recall with much the same feeling as a first love.

Branley’s book2 lifted me to an orbit that would inevitably intersect with science fiction and fantasy—and that same sense of wonder. While still in grade school, I recall encounters with Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and to this day, recall the impression made upon my imagination of the vast underground cities of Earth with their conveyor belt-like roadways. I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and recall the difficulty I had in imagining a tesseract3. I read with fascinating The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, and wished my closet was as interesting as that of Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. I read Edward Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix and wished I had a mountain behind my house. (All I had were boring woods!)

It wasn’t until junior high school in the suburbs of Los Angeles that I really become addicted to that sense of wonder. A friend of mine introduced me to the books of Piers Anthony4 and it seemed that for many years all I did was feed that sense of wonder with his books. Fortunately, he had written many books.

But a sense of wonder is fickle. Like drug, you crave more and more of it, and if you don’t get it, after some severe withdrawal symptoms, the feeling fades away and it is hard to remember what it felt like in the first place.

II. Science Fiction Age

In college, I was still reading the occasional Piers Anthony book. For my minor (in journalism) I wanted to write a paper on science fiction and my advisor (the writer Susan Straight) was encouraging. Fortunately, my university was home to one of the premier collections of science fiction available, the Eaton Collection. Around the same time, I discovered a new magazine on racks of bookstore shelves, a beautiful, glossy, science fiction magazine called Science Fiction Age5. The coincidence of these two events: my thesis and my discovery of Science Fiction Age rekindled that sense of wonder in me.

I began reading science fiction again, and moved away from Piers Anthony novels. From Science Fiction Age I discovered Barry N. Malzberg6 and found Hervoit’s World in the library and it was as if the universe split open and something entirely new emerged. Science Fiction Age brought me into the world of short science fiction and fantasy. I read each issue of the magazine from cover to cover. I found and read Harlan Ellison’s Dangrous Visions. I was astonished by just how powerful short fiction was. In many ways, short fiction with its concentration evoked an even more potent sense of wonder than science fiction novels. I also re-discovered Isaac Asimov and after reading his memoir, I. Asimov, I began to chase down everything he’d ever written.

I began to write science fiction stories of my own, submitting them to every market I could find.

III. Age of Wonder

For a long time, I read a lot of non-fiction, mostly Isaac Asimov’s. I read all of his collections of science essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I read (and re-read) all three volumes of his autobiography. I was learning to be a writer from Asimov’s example. I was writing and submitted stories even though I wasn’t reading much s.f. I also read and re-read Asimov’s entire FOUNDATION series, and then, with trepidation (and ultimately, delight), the Second Foundation Trilogy, penned by Gregory Benford, Greg Bear, and David Brin respectively. Just thinking of those books can sometimes stir that sense of wonder within me.

Sometime in 1997, however, for reasons I no longer remember, I picked up David G. Hartwell’s book, Age of Wonder. That book turned out to be the gateway drug back to the sense of wonder.

In a relatively short span of time, I devoured The Stars My Destination and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester7. I read Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys8 and Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg, one of the best novels I’ve ever read in my life. I read Time Out of Joint by Phillip K. Dick and The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert A. Heinlein and Beyond Apollo by Barry N. Malzberg and The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. For a feverish period between September and November 1997, I lived on a high that was pure sense of wonder.

That high lasted a while. I continued to write and submit stories. I continued to collect rejection slips. My reading broadened and nonfiction began its stead encroachment on my fiction reading time. The sense of wonder faded with some occasional, but brief, bright spots like Gregory Benford’s Timescape, Robert J. Sawyer’s Calcuating God, and Pete Hamill’s Forever. Eventually, in late 2006, I made my first professional science fiction story sale to Edmund Schubert at Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show. That first story, “When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer,” was all about sense of wonder. I was now creating my own.

IV. Vacation in the Golden Age

As began to write and publish my own s.f. stories, I found it harder and harder to read s.f. stories. I’ve heard from other writers that this is not uncommon. My reading continued to expand broadly across nonfiction, however. Still, I yearned for that sense of wonder.

In late 2010, I had this idea of “vacationing” in the Golden Age of science fiction. I can’t remember the germ for the idea, but I wrote about it in a post called “Vacation in the Golden Age of Science Fiction9.” This led to a 2-year stretch where I read every page of every issue of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION from the July 1939 issue, writing in detail about everything I encountered in the issue. This became my blog series, “Vacation in the Golden Age.” Once again, I was steeped in the sense of wonder, not only reading these classics from the 1940s, but imaging what life was like for the kids reading those pulps at that time.

Not only did enjoy the classics in their original form, but I discovered many gems I’d never heard of. Later, I was invited to write a led editorial for ANALOG, and wrote a piece called “Gem Hunting10” where I described some of the gems I discovered. Among them: “The Day Is Done” by Lester del Rey, “Greater Than Gods” by C. L. Moore, “Rust” by Joseph E. Kelley, Final Blackout (a 3-part serial) by L. Ron Hubbard, and “Magic City” by Nelson S. Bond.

I rode that wave of nostalgia and wonder for 41 issues of the magazine, taking me from July 1939 – November 1942, before petering out and moving onto other things. Meanwhile, I continued to sell stories, but I felt the beginnings of that sense of wonder (both in my writing and reading) to wane. More and more, I read nonfiction. Our family grew. Work got busy. Both the time and desire to write science fiction faded to nothing. I began to deliberately shy away from science fiction, in part at least because I wasn’t writing it, and I was worried that the sense of wonder was gone forever. Indeed, when I went back and tried to read Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION series, it seemed much flatter than I recalled it. That terrified me, and for a long time, I didn’t read science fiction.

V. The Search Continues

Recently, I’ve been missing that sense of wonder. I’ve asked myself again and again if it is possible to recapture it. Maybe its the times we live in but I suddenly feel desperate for that feeling of awe that I had when I read science fiction in my youth.

I turned back to Hartwell’s Age of Wonder skimming here and there. He talks about that sense of wonder and he talks about losing it. Something occurred to me then: I was not widely read when that sense of wonder took hold in me. It was the ideas less than the writing that I wanted. When I went back decades later and tried to re-read FOUNDATION, I was much more attuned to the writing than I had been the first time around. I noticed its pulpish qualities, and that somehow dimmed the overall story for me. But I still wanted to reclaim that feeling of wonder.

There is a story about Lester del Rey that says he wrote his first science fiction story when he read a story in a magazine, tossed it across the room and said to his girlfriend at the time, “I could do better than that!” To which his girlfriend replied, “I dare you to.” And thus a legend was formed.

In early 2024, I dared myself to write a story that would evoke a sense of wonder. I did. I wrote a story called “Our Tom11.” It was more magic realism than science fiction. Not only did I write it, but I submitted it, my first unsolicited submissions in more than a decade. It has collected two rejections, but with positive feedback.

Meanwhile, I decided to chase after that sense of wonder once again. I looked back at what I had read the field and found woeful gaps, especially in short fiction, which (a) is what I am best at writing, and (b) has more concentration of wonder per story than a novel. I obtained three of Garnder Dozois’s “Best Of12” anthologies: The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, and The Very Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels. I’m nearly finished with the first, and folks, the magic is still there. I’ve found that sense of wonder in stories like John Kessel’s “The Pure Product13” (1986); Brian Stableford’s magnificent “Mortimer Gray’s History of Death” (1995); “Coming of Age in Kathie” (1995) by Ursula K. Le Guin; “Recording Angel” (1996) by Ian McDonald; “A Dry Quiet War” (1996) by Tony Daniel; and “The Story of Your Life” (1998) by Ted Chiang, which I have added to my short list of perfect stories. I’m already looking forward to the other volumes.

I read and enjoyed Gregory Benford’s In the Ocean of Night which stirred that sense of wonder, although not as much as the short fiction. I’ve read the first two volumes of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver and The Confusion, which have been delightful. I am also reading (or sort-of re-reading) Harlan’s Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, which I read pieces of in college. I’ll follow that with Again, Dangerous Visions, and the recently released, The Last Dangerous Visions.

It would appear that where science fiction novels first stirred the sense of wonder in me, it is short science fiction that stirs it today. Looking back, maybe it has always been short science fiction, it just took me longer to discover that.

And it is that sense of wonder that seems to inspire me most in my own writing. Since I’ve started this journey of “re-discovery”, I’ve started writing again. I mentioned one story, “Our Tom.” I’ve got two more stories lined up and waiting to be written. Maybe some of the sense of wonder I’m mainlining will rub off on those stories.

The book was written in 1958. When I read it in the late 1970s, Pluto was still a planet. ︎I never met Branley and never had the opportunity to thank him for his book. He died in 2002. ︎At the time, I felt this lack of understanding a deficiency in my reading ability. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood a tesseract was a four-dimensional object that was virtually impossible to visualize in a three-dimensional world. ︎It turned out that I had a read Piers Anthony once before without realizing it when I checked out his novel Race Against Time from the Granada Hills branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. ︎The magazine, edited by the brilliant Scott Edelman, ran from 1992-2000. Scott published the first two of my letters ever to appear in an s.f. magazine. I have a full run of the magazine on my shelves in my office. ︎Much later, Barry became a kind of mentor of mine. I met him on several occasions at Readercon. He championed my Vacation in the Golden Age. He read and commented on my stories. We exchanged something like 500 emails over the years. ︎But my favorite Bester of all time is his story “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used To.” Back when Ellen Datlow was editing SCI FICTION, she would publish one classic story in each issue. I made the suggestion that she publish this one, and ultimately, she did. ︎Budrys gave me my first (or possibly second?) personalized rejection I ever received for a story of mine, calling the opening “extraordinary.” ︎Charlie Jane Anders later reprinted this piece. ︎Appeared in the June 2013 issue of ANALOG. ︎If it ever sells, I’ll let you know. ︎I have this vague idea in my mind of going back and reading all 35 volumes of Dozois’ Year’s Best series. But I haven’t acted on it as of yet. ︎Something in this story reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore”, which is another of the “perfect” stories on my list. ︎

This is just a quick note to recognize that today, October 26, 2025 is the official 20th anniversary of this blog. My first post (a list of driving music) appeared on October 26, 2005. Back then, the blog was on LiveJournal, but it was just a few years later that I migrated it to WordPress, which I have been using ever since.

In the year last 20 years, I’ve written more than 7,300 posts, seen my nearly 2 million people and totaling nearly 4 million views.

The blog serves as a kind of parallel journal of my life over the last 20 years. Of all of the writing I’ve done, writing for the blog is my favorite. Perhaps that is because of the wonderful readers that I have, always kind, even when correcting many infelicities in my writing, always engaging.

So on this 20th anniversary, I send a big THANK YOU out to all of my readers over the years. You are the best a writer could hope for!

In the summer of 2007, I traveled to Europe for a month and I brought with me, as entertainment for the flight, the recent James Bond hit Casino Royale. I spent my first few days in Europe in Venice, and as I walked about St. Mark’s Square, I was momentarily taken aback by its familiarity. Then I realized I had just seen this place in the James Bond film. How cool it was to actually be in the same city!

One of the joys of fiction is visiting places I’ve never been. I’ve wandered through the Library of Trantor at the center of the Galactic Empire1. I’ve watched an old man wrestle with a fish off the coast of Cuba2. I’ve sat in shady backrooms of the Tweed machine in 19th century Manhattan3. I’ve been to Manhattan, of course, but never to 19th century Manhattan.

But much as I discovered with St. Mark’s square, there is also a joy of encountering in a work of fiction a place that I have visited. This happened recently as I read Dan Brown’s latest suspense thriller, The Secret of Secrets.

I’m not a huge Dan Brown fan, but I’ll admit to enjoying The Da Vinci Code when it first came out, attracted by the words “Da Vinci” and “Code.” Brown is a kind of modern-day pulp writer—and as one who loves pulp science fiction from the late 1930s and 1940s, I don’t mean this as an insult. His writing is jagged and primary colors, but his stories can pull me in. What pulled me in about this one particularly was that it was set in Prague, and I spent several days in Prague in the summer of 2024.

It was fun to see Robert Langdon race through the various places I’d been in the city: walking across the Charles Bridge; strolling past the Fred and Ginger buildings; watching the clock chime in the old town square; looking over the city from the parapets of Prague Castle. It reminded me that as much as fiction can take you places you’ve never been before, there is no substitute for actually being there. I would have visualized scenes much differently had I not been to the city myself, and that may have changed my perception of the book.

The “Fred and Ginger” buildings, Prague.

Ultimately, I found Brown’s story intriguing—for the first half of the book. After that, I thought it got a little silly. But I kept reading mainly because the story was also a travelogue through Prague, and it was a pleasant reminder of my time in that ancient capital.

Mostly in Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov. ︎In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea ︎In Pete Hamill’s wonderful Forever . ︎

I have been reading Robert D. Richardson’s 1995 biography Emerson: The Mind On Fire. I find myself more fascinated by Emerson’s use of notebooks than by his actual writing or transcendentalism. Halfway through the biography, it seems to me that Emerson thought through his notebooks. By the end of his life, he’d filled hundreds of them. It was Emerson who asked a young Henry David Thoreau, “Do you keep a journal?” setting Thoreau down a path that would lead to his famous journals.

I’ve written before of my fascination with journals and diaries and notebooks. That fascination has, over the years, manifested itself in attempts to reproduce the use of journals and notebooks in digital form: first with Evernote, and later with Obsidian. These are fun experiments, but ultimately, for me, they are failed experiments. All of the exciting features that digital tools bring (linking, searching, etc.) never seem to live up to the value I get from notebooks, from paper. I’ve given this a lot of thought and one conclusion I’ve arrived at is that possibly this is a bridge too far across the digital divide. I grew up writing everything down: letters, schoolwork, early diaries and journals. It wasn’t until college that I began to use a computer for writing, and then, initially, it was not for notes but for final drafts of papers and essays. Like Emerson, I think better on paper. And yet, the “paper” always seems more cumbersome than its digital counterpart. This makes the digital world appealing, and accounts for my many experiments.

It seems odd to me that a number of seemingly practical skills were, for the most part, left out of my education. With one exception—a fantastic 7th grade science teacher—I was never taught how to take notes, either in a classroom lecture or from my reading. I was never taught how to do research: that is, I was never taught the process of going about research, the dos and don’ts. No one ever told me to go to primary sources wherever possible. No one told me how to look for what I needed. I was never taught to write a journal. These seem to me to be practical skills, but I had to figure them out on my own.

In Emerson’s time, things were different. As Richardson writes,

One thing he had learned in college was how to keep journals. Beginning in 1819, when he was a sophomore, Emerson began keeping a college theme notebook as well as a list of books he had read1. A third notebook, begun for drafts of his college essays on Socrates, turned into a notebook for poetry. A fourth, begun in 1820 for notes in a lecture course… grew into a general notebook for drafts of essays and poems. Also in 1820 he began a series of notebooks, each called “Universe,” each with a number, which were commonplace books full of quotations from his reading.

Emerson learned this in college and it seems to me that these journals and notebooks became his primary tool for thinking. Much later in the biography, as Emerson is starting to write his Essays, Richardson notes how Emerson had tried to be systematic about his journals from the start. He writes,

Emerson’s journals were now numerous. There were perhaps as many as a hundred by 1839, and just finding specific entries in the shelves of his notebooks was a problem that increased with time. He made an index of each journal’s contents in the back of it. By 1838 he began making lists of topics, entering under each topic a list of passages that might apply, giving location symbols and page numbers by which he could locate each passage. By 1843 he had a separate notebook with a topic at the head of each page and for each topic dozens of one-sentence references to passages in the journal. By 1847 he had a 400-page master index of topics, each followed by scores, even by hundreds of short quotes and location symbols.

Richardson goes on to make an important point:

These indexes themselves… represent many months and perhaps years of work all by themselves.

But that work was also learning. Emerson wasn’t just using the notebooks to organize his thought, cull what he had captured to find the best material. And in doing so, he learned the material better and better as he went along. This is something that never worked well for me in my attempts at digital notes and notebooks. The ease of search, the linking of notes made it too easy in some regards. The tools did all of the work and I did almost none, the reverse of Emerson’s situation.

There has always been, for me, a lure to technology, a promise of something better through it. The truth, in my experience, has been something less than the promise. I started my Going Paperless experiment because, throughout the second half of the 1990s, I’d been reading about this elusive paperless office, but had never seen one in practice. Was it possible? I wondered. For some people, perhaps, but growing up, as I did, on paper, so to speak, I found that the vision and the reality rapidly came into conflict.

In one of my favorite of Isaac Asimov’s essays, “The Ancient and the Ultimate2,” Asimov wrote about the evolution of books. He predicted how they would become electronic, how they would allow us to carry entire libraries with us. They would need a power source but over time that too would be improved. They would grow smaller and more compact. They would remember exactly where you left off reading. The end result was—the very paper books that we have today. I feel the same way about notebooks. They can grow, evolve, morph into a digital form, but the ultimate, to me, seems to be on paper.

Emerson’s model is interesting to me because it worked for him. He was systematic. He thought on paper. I suspect that this was not uncommon generally in his time, but that he was uncommon specifically.

My kids don’t have notebooks the way I had them in school. They have laptops and iPads. Their “notebooks” are Google Docs and other digital forms. They’ve grown up this way, but I wonder if it impacts the way we think: on paper versus on a keyboard or tablet? And I don’t see anyone teaching them how to take notes, or how to do research, or how to keep a journal. The medium for journaling has morphed from the long-form, handwritten journal to the quick Instagram or Snapchat post. Notes, journals, diaries have been a source of historical context and value for thousands of years. It seems a bit of a shame to see that fading away into the digital event horizon.

At least I started keeping a list of books I’d read! ︎The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1973. ︎

I am currently in the process of taking inventory of the books in my library. I’ve started with the physical books and so far I’d put the estimate somewhere between 1,200-1,400. I know that I have more than 1,700 audiobooks on top of that. And another 500 or so e-books. Call it 3,600 books all told. The physical books are dearest to me. The audiobooks get backed up locally “just in case,” but I don’t backup the e-books because I don’t care enough about them. I rarely buy e-books these days.

In my journal, I clip pictures of other people’s libraries and offices that appear in magazines. (I have a double-spread from a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine on Cormac McCarthy’s library.) I see these libraries with ten times the books I have in mine, and I’m envious.

Yet sometimes, early in the morning when I come into my office/library before my morning walk, I sit for a moment, surrounded by a library that I’ve built up over most of my lifetime, and I am grateful. Walking into my office is like walking into a bookstore tailored to just my taste in books. It is my ideal library.

Well, my desk is a mess and maybe I’ll put it into some order today. I have far too many books I want to read, all of them RIGHT NOW and on a wide variety of subjects. I want to re-learn science, not how it was taught in school, but with a historical backbone to it. But having just finished Joe Posnanski’s The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini, I want to learn magic and some of its history. I want to produce an inventory and card catalog of all of my books. I want to clean out–and get rid of–the filing cabinet in my office. There is a backlog of magazine articles I want to read. I want to get a new interactive version of my reading list up on the blog. I want to complete my Vacation in the Golden Age. And this is all just from the top of my head. I need to pick something–anything–and start with that. Well, my desk is a mess and maybe I’ll put it into some order today.

It recently occurred to me that I have been using and collecting Field Notes notebooks for more than a decade now. My first notebook dates from June 2015, which means I’ve been using these notebooks longer than our youngest daughter has been alive1. In that time, I’ve collected a few hundred notebooks, thanks in part to the Field Notes quarterly subscription I’ve had for much of this time. As I use the different notebooks, I’ve found that I like some more than others.

My favorite of all of the Field Notes notebooks I’ve used is their Heavy Duty notebook. It is my preferred notebook to carry around with me, and it is the one that I have ordered more of than any other. The notebook was introduced in the summer of 2020 and I’ve filled probably half a dozen of them now.

These are durable, spiral-bound notebooks, bound at the top rather than the left side like most of their traditional notebooks are. They have a heavy cardboard cover and backing, and thicker paper. One side of the paper is lined and the other side is a grid. There are also 80 pages in this notebook, almost twice as many as are typically included in a Field Notes notebook.

From a practical standpoint, I find it easier to pull this notebook from my pocket and flip it open and start scribbling. I use both sides of the page so that when I hold the notebook open, all of the scribbles are in the same direction.

A typical page from my current Heavy Duty notebook.

These days, I use these notebooks much the same way that I always have, capturing thoughts out in the wild, scribbling lists, notes from reading, names of waiters at restaurants. In addition, I’ve found that I’ve also started jotting observations and other ideas that I normally would reserve for digital notes. So these notebooks have become truly a set of Field Notes for me, and flipping through one gives me a good picture of what I was doing and thinking on any given day.

Every now and then, I’ll order a few more of the Heavy Duty notebooks, even though I have a variety of notebooks to choose from, because I really enjoy using the Heavy Duty notebooks, and I want to make sure I have a decent supply in case Field Notes decides to stop making them.

I used to use a Pilot G-2 0.7 pen to write in my Field Notes notebooks, but with the Heavy Duty notebooks, I’ve been using a Tombow MONO drawing pen 01, which I buy in 12-packs.

I frequently give Field Notes notebooks as little gifts, but I selfishly hold back my Heavy Duty notebooks. I like them that much.

Indeed, I have a notebook in which I recorded all of the details of her birth from heading to the hospital to bringing her home a few days later. ︎

The September / October issue of Smithsonian Magazine has a fantastic article by Richard Grant1 on Cormac McCarthy’s library. Over the years, I’ve read just three of McCarthy’s books: No Country for Old Men in 2018, and more recently the dual novel / novella The Passenger and Stella Maris, both of which were among my best reads of 2023.

I’m a sucker for libraries, and I love to read about the personal libraries of other people. Grant’s article was all about McCarthy’s library, two years after his death. That library contains an estimated 20,000 books2!

Some people collect books to preserve them in pristine condition, elevating their value. With few exceptions, I don’t do that, and it turns out, McCarthy is a kindred spirit:

His books, many of which are annotated with margin comments, promise to reveal far more about this elusive literary giant than the few cagey interviews he gave when he was alive.

I am also fascinated by polymaths, and according to Grant,

McCarthy was a genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity.

If I could go back in time to when I was 6 or 7 years old and adults would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, instead of saying “astronomer,” I would say “genius-level intellectual polymath with an insatiable curiosity.” Maybe it would have focused me more.

McCarthy’s library is eclectic, much like my own, and his interests spanned over everything. “‘Seventy-five titles by or about Wittgenstein’,” writes Grant, “‘And most of them are annotated, meaning Cormac read them closely.'”

Later in the article, Grant notes:

Then I learned he had an eidetic memory and could remember nearly everything he had read or heard, including the lyrics to thousands of songs.

If I could go back in time to when I was 6 or 7 years old and adults would ask me what superpower I would want, I’d say an eidetic memory. I’ve known only one person who I was almost certain had an eidetic memory, and it was impressive!

There were other similarities I saw in the article:

McCarthy often had a pencil when he was reading and would make tiny vertical marks next to sentences that interested him and add comments in the margins in small print handwriting.

Or,

He never left the house without a book.

One place where we differed was in our opinions of Moby Dick. According to McCarthy’s brother, it was Cormac McCarthy’s favorite book. I enjoyed it, but saw it mostly as a travelogue.

His library was largely in disarray, but the sheer size and variety of it made my mouth water as I read the article. I sat in my reading chair, surrounded by more than a thousand of my own books, thinking, Gee, I wish I had a library of my own!

For book lovers, and includes fantastic photos of McCarthy’s library by Wayne Martin Berger. This is a great piece and I highly recommend it.

Grant is probably my favorite feature writer for the magazine. In a little squib about him for the article, it mentions that he is working on a book about McCarthy. ︎I’m in the process of updating the catalog of my own library, which contains considerably fewer than 20,000 volumes. ︎

Sometimes, I need a breath of fresh air. Back in February, I discovered that one of my favorite writers, the late David McCullough, was coming out with a new book, edited by his daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson. The book, History Matters, came out today and I began listening to it with delight on my morning walk.

The book is a collection of unpublished essays, speeches, and miscellany from McCullough’s paper. His words are a breath of fresh air in these trying times. I’ll have more to say about the book when I finish it, but I wanted to alert readers who happen to be fans of McCullough that this book was now available.

And bonus: if you get the audiobook edition, there is at least one speech which was recorded and you can hear McCullough’s voice (the voice that narrated Ken Burns’ The Civil War) once more.

McCulloughs words put me in a good mood. They are, as he was, both realistic about the short-term future, but optimistic about the long-term. It is a refreshing tone, and one that I greatly admire.

There are, from time to time, books I attempt to read that I am simply not ready for. They seem interesting, I start them, but I don’t make it very far. Years later I might come back to them, and find that I am ready, and I read the book with joy and delight that wasn’t evident on that early attempt. What gives? There are other times when my mind seeks out everything, when an embarras de richesses of books sit stacked on my desk and it seems I am bombarded on all sides by books that I desperately want to read and find myself paralyzed by the pull of so many different interests, a kind of Lagrange point in reading space. What gives?

I have frequently pointed to the butterfly effect of reading as a guide to what I choose to read next, but recently, while contemplating why it sometimes seems I am not ready to read a book, I have come up with a possibly better explanation. I call it the orbital mechanics of reading.

Gravity Well and Escape Velocity

Reading takes effort. Unlike film and television, which is passive, where the sound and images are provided for the audience, reading is active: a reader is presented with words and must decode and interpret those words to create the scenes, the connections, and the understanding all inside their head. There is a kind of literacy gravity well that exists which takes energy and effort to escape.

I have only the vaguest memories of learning to read1, but one thing I do remember was thinking that it was hard, and that as I stuttered along trying to make out the words, it seemed as if I’d never be fluent, never get to the point where I could soar on my own.

The earliest rockets didn’t escape Earth’s gravity but instead made parabolic arcs to the edge of space and then fell inevitably back to the Earth. It takes enormous amounts of energy to break free of Earth’s gravity well and reach escape velocity. This is true for reading as well. Enormous effort goes into decoding and parsing out the strange characters on the page. It takes more effort to allow those characters to create images in one’s head. And it takes stamina to sustain the flight. My early efforts found me making similar parabolas, up, up, attempting to read a book, only to tire or grow frustrated and fall back to the Earth.

But like with any exercise, you keep at it, build your strength, and one day, you find yourself reading a book with seemingly no effort. The words on the page have vanished, the images in your head are clear. You are floating above the world. You are reading. You are ready to begin exploring.

The Orbital Mechanics of Reading

Books, for me, have an attraction that is analogous to gravity. I escaped the initial gravity well of learning to reading when I was young. Imagine my trajectory as a curve moving out from that point in spacetime. Early on I encountered an astronomy book that had an outsized influence on me. Its attraction was strong. Its gravity altered my orbit slightly, pulling me in one direction, perturbing the initially smooth curve of my journey.

In junior high school, I encountered a dense gravitational source, a galaxy of science fiction and fantasy novels2 that pulled me in. Over the course of many years, I whisked through the galaxy, one book slingshotting me on to the next. Yet eventually, I emerged from that particular gravitational source, slung out to discover what else was out there.

These dense gravitational sources, subject areas like science, history, or even particular authors or series, make up a lumpiness to the geometry of reading space. They explain the major perturbations of my trajectory. But what about those near misses, the ones that I try out, don’t fit, but seem to fit perfectly years or decades later?

The geometry of reading space, like that of spacetime, is four-dimensional. What I think happens on those near misses is that our orbits don’t actually intersect enough for the gravity of the book to take hold. I am moving too fast, or too far from the subject of the book for it to hold me. I think, for instance, of E. O. Wilson’s Consilience as one such example. A friend recommended it to me in the late 1990s, but it didn’t stick. I was too fast or too far from its subject matter at that time. My journey continued and my trajectory was shifted this way and that by my reading, until, two decades later, I reencountered Consilience, and this time, our orbits intersected perfectly. I was better equipped from my two decades of reading to read the book than I had been two decades earlier.

At other times (now is one such time) it is as if I am passing through a field of high-density subjects that push and prod me from my path, making it hard to stick with any one, because I want to read all of them. It explains well why I am slowly making my way through a re-read of Carl Sagan’s Broca’s Brain, Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, and Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery. All have dense gravity fields, all have a pull on me, and there are even more dense fields up ahead. At times like these, it is hard to focus on any one book because I want to read all of them.

Charting the Heavens

My trajectory is easy to chart, thanks to the list I’ve kept of books I’ve read since 1996. In one possible model, one could imagine plotting time on the x-axis, and subject matter on the y-axis. From that, one could see graphically not only the curve of my trajectory over the decades, but identify the gravitational sources that pulled and prodded my reading this way and that. One might even be able to model the relative strength of those gravitational sources based on how long they kept me in their thrall.

Charting the Future Trajectory

Here, at last, my analogy with orbital mechanics breaks down. Where astronomers can clearly predict the orbit of a comet or planet for centuries into the future, the reading horizon in front of me is necessarily short. One gravity well might grasp me for a book or two before I slingshot out toward something else. A book that seems super-interesting might fall flat. A topic for which I never gave much thought might have the density of a white dwarf and suck me in for months. It is from this unpredictable nature of where my reading will take me next that I initially came up with the butterfly effect of reading.

My reading, it turns out, is more directed than just random flaps of a butterfly’s wings. There was an initial launch, a long, slow cruise while my abilities improved. I then began encountering asteroids, planets, solar systems, and entire galaxies of knowledge that pushed and pulled my course, slowing me at times, speeding me up at others.

This also explains why, when I talk about what I plan to read next, it is just that: aspirational. I cannot see the as-yet invisible gravity wells that lie ahead of me and shift me away from that plan to something even more interesting.

And isn’t that what makes reading and learning the amazing journey that it is?

I remember the joy I felt sounding out the word “L-O-V-E” the first time and realizing thatE was silent. ︎I was all over the map here. A lot of Piers Anthony, introduced to his novels by my junior high school friend Noah. There was also Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. At this point in my journey, I was finishing maybe half of the books that I started. ︎