Not the best few weeks. Old people have health issues. Who knew? We were planning to go to Italy in a week or so, in particular to see the wonderful-sounding Fra Angelico exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi. Hopefully we will still be able to catch that before it ends in late January. But who knows?

My mind hasn’t exactly been laser-focused, then, on logical matters. In fact, I’ve been doing a lot of decorating instead, as concentrating on the tasks in hand (a lot of prep work needed in a late Victorian house) is very helpfully distracting and de-stressing. So it has all been Farrow and Ball rather than Florentine Madonnas.

The category theory book ends with an apt quotation from Louise Glück’s poem ‘Afterword’: “Reading what I have just written, I now believe / I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been / slightly distorted, . . .”. But the book is already almost five hundred pages long, and stopping very much less precipitously would make it markedly longer again. Still, the current last chapter keeps nagging at me and — needs must — I find myself expanding some of the sections. It’s not that I want to significantly change the general line about ETCS; but the discussion could certainly be clearer (and perhaps give more pointers too for those who want to explore the final themes further). Currently I’m brooding about just what we should make of the fact that — suitably augmented with a Replacement-like axiom — ETCS is in fact almost bi-interpretable with ZFC. When I’m a bit happier with it, I will put online the revised final chapter (in fact, now split into two chapters), to invite comments while I’m finishing minor revisions to the rest of the book. As I said before, I hope to have a complete new version done and dusted early in the new year.

Already, as December approaches, those books-of-the-year pages have started appearing. No less than sixty-six contributors to the Times Literary Supplement offer their recommendations in the last issue. Choices of highly variable degrees of attractiveness. A couple of novels have gone on my list of possible titles to browse next time I’m in Heffers. But almost nothing makes we want to rush to the bookshop — except that A.E. Stallings (I’m a great admirer) very warmly praises Wellwater by Karen Solie (a name new to me), so I’ll certainly look for that.

The book which happens to be recommended most often is The Poems of Seamus Heaney. But am I alone in finding massive volumes of poetry — in this case, over a thousand pages — often dauntingly off-putting? I think I’d much rather look out for a few more of Heaney’s individually published slim collections to add to the ones we already have.

Those sixty-six contributors must mention almost a hundred and fifty recent books. I’ve read — or more accurately, read in part — just three. Is that a depressingly low strike-rate? I confess I didn’t get very far with Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky (much as though I enjoyed a couple of her earlier novels). And more forgivably, I have only read parts of Stefan Collini’s Literature and Learning — the history of English studies in Britain is not particularly my topic, but I always admire Collini’s writing, and the theme of the rise and fall of a certain conception of the critical enterprise interests me. The third recommended book, though, I’ll most certainly finish. I’m slowly reading, two or three poems at a time, and am almost at the end of Sarah Howe’s wonderful Foretokens, the follow-up (after ten years) to her prize-winning first collection Loop of Jade. Quite exceptional.

So what else would I have recommended as my books of the year?

Perhaps Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found became available too late for our TLS contributors to judge; but I’m devouring it. And as for novels? The most recent ones I’ve read seem to have been the most disappointing (how on earth did Andrew Miller’s pedestrian yet prize-winning, Booker-shortlisted, The Land in Winter garner such praise?). No, my fiction read of the year — Tolstoy aside! — has to be Rosamond Lehmann’s 1936 The Weather in the Streets. The sheer pleasure to be had from her writing beats anything you get in the likes of Andrew Miller by a country mile.

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