I track every book I read.

Religiously. Compulsively. Joyfully.

I use Goodreads to log titles and dates. I keep an Excel spreadsheet that catalogs my entire personal library, sortable by author, genre, and whether I’ve actually read it or am merely hoping to someday. I record YouTube videos reflecting on what I’ve read, what I’m reading, and what’s slowly clawing its way up my towering, guilt-laced TBR. I jot down notes or excerpts in a physical commonplace journal (though, admittedly, that’s more sporadic than it is sacred).

So when I recently watched a Memoria Press video in which several members of a group of adults (well-read, thoughtful adults!) casually mentioned that they don’t track their reading at all, I felt a strange, complex combination of awe and disgust.

They just … read?

No spreadsheet? No charts? No annual wrap-up posts complete with genre breakdowns and five-star favorites? No log to look back on with quiet pride (or self-reproach)?

I won’t pretend I’m not intrigued by that approach. There’s something beautifully unburdened about it. But I’m also not giving up my system anytime soon. Because for me, tracking my reading isn’t about showing off, or chasing numbers, or wringing productivity out of a pastime that’s already deeply nourishing on its own.

It’s about attention. And retention. And gratitude.

A Conversation with Myself

At its most basic level, tracking what I read is a way of staying in conversation with my past self. That version of me who picked up No One Is Talking About This on a whim during a rough patch in November of 2024? Or the me who finally got around to reading The Dispossessed after a decade of false starts? The me who couldn’t get through the assigned reading of Moby Dick as a teenager? They’re still in there, still shaping the contours of my inner world, and my reading log is one of the few places where I can go back and listen to them.It’s not always deep. Sometimes I’m just noting a title and a finish date. Other times, I’ll write a few sentences about why something hit me the way it did (or didn’t). But even that little gesture of recording it gives the experience a kind of permanence. It says: This mattered.

Measuring What Can’t Be Measured

Of course, there’s a danger in turning reading into a performance. If you’re not careful, tracking can become tallying, and tallying can become competing—even if it’s just with yourself. You start chasing totals. You feel guilty about long books, or books you abandon halfway through. You start comparing your reading pace to strangers on the internet who seem to inhale five books between breakfast and lunch and then ten more before dinner.

But here’s the trick: the numbers are not the point. They’re just scaffolding.

What I really want to measure isn’t how many books I read, but how deeply they reached me. How much they asked of me. How much they changed me.

A spreadsheet can’t quite quantify that. But it can create the conditions for reflection. It can slow me down enough to ask: Why this book? Why now? What did it stir within me?

The Habits of Attention

I’ve stated this a million times, but I teach fifth grade science and literature, which means I spend my days trying to help ten-year-olds pay attention to the right things. Not just to facts and dates, but to ideas. To structure. To character. To detail. To beauty.

And one of the most important things I’ve learned is that attention is a muscle. It has to be trained. Reading helps with that. 

But so does tracking.

When I keep a record of what I’m reading, I find that I read more deliberately. I notice patterns. I realize I’ve read five books in a row by men and none by women. I realize I’ve been stuck in the same genre rut for three months. I realize I keep saying I want to read more poetry, and then not doing it. My tracker keeps me honest. It makes me a better reader—not because it tells me what to do, but because it helps me see what I’m actually doing.

And from there, I can adjust. With intention.

Sharing the Journey

There’s another reason I track my reading: I want to share it. Not to signal virtue or aesthetic superiority, but to connect.

Books are the most generous kind of conversation. But that conversation deepens when you bring someone else into it—whether that’s a student who’s reading Harry Potter for the first time, a friend who just finished the same book you did, or a stranger who stumbles across your YouTube channel and decides, on your recommendation, to give Cryptonomicon a try.

By logging my books, I create a kind of trail of breadcrumbs. A path others can follow, question, deviate from, or deepen. It’s a small act of curation. A signal: Here’s what I’ve loved. Maybe you will, too.

When I Don’t Track

With all this being said, not every reading experience makes it into the spreadsheet. Sometimes I pick up a book, read twenty pages, and set it down with no intention of returning. Sometimes I’m reading aloud to my students or thumbing through a reference work I’ve owned for years. Those moments don’t always get cataloged, and I think that’s OK.

The point of tracking, for me, isn’t to build a flawless archive. It’s to stay attentive. To keep reading as an active, reflective, relational practice. To remember that books aren’t just something I consume, but something I commune with.

And if that communion sometimes requires an Excel sheet with color-coded tabs? So be it.

Final Thoughts

Whether you track your reading obsessively or prefer to let books wash over you unrecorded, the important thing is this: read with presence. Read with curiosity. Read with the knowledge that every book—even the odd ones, the disappointing ones, the ones you forget almost immediately—is part of the longer story you’re writing with your life.

And if you happen to write it down along the way, all the better.

I tell my students that every book talks to you before you open it.

Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it shouts. Sometimes it beckons mysteriously from across the bookstore with a glint of foil or an odd texture. But one way or another, it speaks—and you decide, in a fraction of a second, whether you’re going to answer.

That’s the power of a book cover.

We don’t always acknowledge it. We’re trained to say things like “don’t judge a book by its cover,” as though the cover were some sort of lie, or a distraction. But that old phrase is wrong on two fronts: first, we do inevitably judge books by their covers, and constantly; and second, book covers aren’t lies. They’re arguments. Visual, compressed, sometimes poetic arguments about genre, tone, identity, and intent. And learning to understand those arguments is part of what we call visual literacy.

As a designer, I’ve spent hours tweaking the space between a serif and a swirl, adjusting kerning until a word feels right. As a teacher, I’ve watched students gravitate toward books on our classroom shelves not because of the summary on the back cover, but because of the way the front cover spoke to them. And as a reader, I know the quiet thrill of recognizing a pattern across covers—a particular style of illustration or layout—and knowing, instinctively, that this book belongs in the same conversation as others I’ve loved.

Visual literacy is, simply put, the ability to read images. To analyze, interpret, and make meaning from what we see—not just in art, but in design, photography, film, advertising, social media, you name it. And like verbal literacy, it’s not innate. It’s learned. It’s practiced. It’s taught.

Covers Are Codes

When you look at the cover of a book—whether it’s minimalist and typographic or lush and illustrated—you’re not just looking at decoration. You’re looking at a set of semiotic signals. A language of form.

Consider the modern sci-fi novel. Angular sans-serif fonts. Lots of black. Metallic accents. Some abstract pattern that hints at technology or stars or time dilation. That’s not accidental. That’s a code—a shorthand telling you, “This is speculative. This is sleek. This might bend your brain a little.”

Compare that to a quiet literary novel with a soft-focus landscape or some sort of abstract backdrop. Or a thriller with jagged text and stark contrast. Or a romance with looping script and soft pinks. These are all visual choices made not just to reflect the content but to shape the expectation of the reader.

Design is always in conversation with genre. But the best covers don’t just mimic the market—they subvert it. They play with our expectations while still working within a shared visual vocabulary.

Teaching the Image

I teach fifth grade, and even at that level—especially at that level—students respond to visual cues with a kind of raw immediacy. They might not have the vocabulary to explain why one book looks “serious” and another looks “fun,” but you know what? They know. And part of my job is helping them articulate that knowing.

When we talk about book covers in class, we ask questions like:

          •      What colors are used, and what mood do they create?
          •      What might the typography tell you about the tone of the story?
          •      What’s pictured? What’s not? Why do you think that choice was made?
          •      If you had to guess the genre from the cover alone, what would you say?

Sometimes we even redesign covers—taking a book we’ve read and asking students to create their own visual interpretation of it. Not just to draw a scene, but to capture the feeling. To consider how their image might speak to someone else. It’s an exercise in empathy, in aesthetics, and in attention.

Visual literacy is not really about being “artsy,” per se. It’s about being attuned to how design shapes understanding. And in a media-saturated world, that’s not optional. It’s essential.

The Ethics of Attraction

Of course, covers aren’t neutral. They reflect trends, but they also reinforce them. When every YA fantasy novel features a similar pale girl in a crown, we have to ask: what kinds of stories are being signaled as “worthy”? Who gets to be on the cover? Who gets erased? The visual landscape of publishing tells a story about power—about what sells, and who decides what sells.

Part of becoming visually literate is learning to see those patterns, as well as to question them.

We teach students to recognize bias in texts. We should also teach them to recognize bias in images. What gets represented and how? What stereotypes are repeated across genres? What assumptions are embedded in style?

This is one of the places where design meets critical thinking.

What Covers Can’t Do (and Why That Matters)

And yet, for all their power, covers are also fragile things. Misleading. Market-driven. Occasionally betrayed by their contents. Some of my favorite books have had baffling covers—either too vague, too loud, or just wildly off the mark.

Which is part of what makes reading so delightful: the dissonance. The act of stepping past the surface and discovering something messier, deeper, stranger.

It’s a reminder that even the best cover is only a doorway. It opens. It invites.

But the real story begins inside.

Final Thoughts

Book covers are both marketing tools as well as visual texts. And like any text, they can be read, misread, deconstructed, admired, and critiqued. The more fluent we become in visual language, the more deeply we engage with the world around us—not just as passive consumers, but as curious, creative participants.

So the next time you pick up a book, pause for a moment. Look closely. Ask what it’s saying—before you ever read a word of it.

Every so often, someone asks me how I find time to read.

The tone varies. Sometimes it’s admiring. Sometimes it’s accusatory. Often it’s said with a kind of mild despair, like I must have access to some secret reservoir of hours that the rest of the world wasn’t issued.

But I don’t.

I teach fifth grade science and literature, which means I am perpetually grading, planning, emailing parents, responding to parent emails, and gently reminding students when their homework is due. I also write, make videos, make music, coach soccer, and play guitar in my church’s worship team. My time is certainly no less limited than anyone else’s.

Here’s the thing: I’ve never thought of reading as just a hobby. It’s not a luxury I squeeze in at the edges of real life. Reading is the life. It’s how I think. How I rest. How I stay connected to something larger than the noise of to-do lists and classroom chaos.

Reading is the slowest magic there is. It asks nothing but time. Not talent. Not money. Just time. And in return, it offers everything: new voices, new ways of seeing, new ways of being. Books don’t care if you’re tired or behind or feeling inadequate. They wait.

And when you come back to them—when you choose, again and again, to open a book instead of turning on the TV or launching into a video game—you start to feel time stretch a little. Just a little. Long enough to slip into a sentence and find yourself somewhere else entirely. (This isn’t to say that a great TV show or video game doesn’t have value—they absolutely do, though, I would argue, in moderation.)

I try to teach my students this. That reading isn’t an assignment to get through, but a portal. That a book is a way of slowing down time. That the act of sitting still with words is a kind of resistance in a world built to keep you endlessly and mindlessly scrolling.

They don’t always get it. Honestly, I didn’t always get it at their age, either. But every once in a while, a kid gets their mind blown by a book, looks up with eyes wide, and says, “That was really good!”

And I can’t help but be thrilled by this. Because I know it wasn’t just entertainment. It was transformation—tiny, maybe, and mostly invisible, but undeniably real.

So if you’ve been too busy to read lately, that’s OK. The books will wait. But when you’re ready, carve out ten minutes. Just ten. Not to “be productive,” not to hit a goal. Just to read. To practice the slow magic again.

And let time open up around you.

I teach fifth grade science and literature. Which means, on any given day, I might go from explaining the phases of the moon to asking a room full of ten-year-olds what they think The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is really about. I’m always straddling the line between fact and fiction, data and dreams, the concrete and the speculative. And I’ve come to believe that creativity lives exactly there: in the space between knowing and wondering.

Teaching is often framed as the transmission of knowledge, and sure, there’s definitely some of that. I’ve got vocabulary words to cover and standards to hit and a pacing guide that insists students need to understand a plethora of scientific concepts by April. But the best moments in the classroom happen not when something is known, but when something is almost known. When a student squints at the board and says, “Wait … does that mean what I think it means?”

That’s where the magic is.

It’s not so different from reading, really. My favorite books, the ones that haunt me long after I’ve shelved them, rarely hand me perfect answers. Instead, they reverberate with implication. They circle around truth like a hawk. Books like Roadside Picnic, The Left Hand of Darkness, Maxwell’s Demon, or Infinite Jest make their meaning in the tension between clarity and mystery. They trust me to do some of the work. They trust me to wonder.

When I write, I try to honor that same space. I don’t want to outline every single beat (though a roadmap can certainly be handy). I don’t always know what a piece is “about” until I’m fairly deep into the process. Sometimes, I write a scene or a paragraph or a line just because it feels right—because it contains something unresolved. And then I try to follow that thread wherever it leads, even if it pulls me somewhere uncomfortable.

I think this is what creativity really is—not some lightning bolt of inspiration, but a sustained willingness to sit with the half-formed, the ambiguous, the not-yet-finished thought. To be okay with the in-between. To teach, to read, to write, to make art—all of it requires us to hover in that liminal space and say: “Let’s see what happens if…”

And that’s why I love doing what I do. Whether I’m in the classroom or staring at a blinking cursor, I get to spend my days dwelling in wonder.

So here’s to the space between knowing and wondering. May we never fully leave it.

The first thing to understand is that the ideas are not yours. Not really.

You’re not a well or a spring or even a clever little idea-machine. You’re more like a resonant cavity. A hallway with good acoustics. A frequency that, if tuned just right, might just hum. Might just vibrate with something strange and startling.

You are, in short, a host. A cracked-open door. And the creative process is not so much a journey of invention as it is a long and difficult apprenticeship in receptivity.

It is also, paradoxically, a discipline.

This is the first paradox of creativity: that in order to generate the seemingly effortless, spontaneous, lightning-strike originality we call a “great idea,” you must show up at the same time every day. You must punch the clock. Sweep the floors. Boil the water. You must clean and re-clean the altar so that, if the gods ever do decide to visit, they won’t trip over your laundry.

But how do you keep having ideas? Not just once—when you’re young and ravenous—but over years? Across novels? From project to project? In seasons when the well goes dry and all the air seems to have been vacuumed out of the room?

I won’t pretend I have a magic formula. But I’ve learned a few things. Or maybe I’ve just failed in enough interesting ways that I’ve started to notice the patterns.

1. Think Weird, Read Weird, Live Weird

Great ideas often come from collisions—friction between disciplines, between categories, between voices that were never meant to be in the same room. If you only ever read space opera, your brain will start to pattern itself like a space opera. If you only ever talk to other indie authors on Discord who are writing the same three stories in a different flavor, you will unconsciously become a remix.

And remixes are OK, and they have their place, but to have unique ideas, you need to introduce contamination.

Read Proust and then read a NASA white paper. Read Octavia Butler on interdependence and then read a handbook on urban wastewater management. Watch a YouTube video on medieval siege weapons, then interview your grandmother about her youth. Play Disco Elysium, then go to a soccer match.

Diversify your cognitive portfolio.

What you’re doing here is stockpiling flint. Later, when you’re exhausted or stuck or desperate to come up with the Next Thing, your brain will strike two of these weird rocks together—and if you’re lucky, and you’ve been faithful to the process, and the gods aren’t entirely indifferent that day—you’ll get a spark.

2. Let Boredom In

We are terrifyingly good at avoiding boredom now. There is a device in your pocket, perhaps even in your hand right now, that is capable of flooding your brain with novelty at a frequency no pre-digital human ever experienced. Infinite scroll. Infinite noise.

But the creative mind needs boredom. It needs a space in which nothing is happening so it can begin to hallucinate.

When was the last time you stared at a wall?

Not a Pinterest wall or a vision board or a spreadsheet. I mean a blank wall. A dull one. One that does nothing for you. When was the last time you stood in the grocery line and didn’t check your phone? Sat in traffic without a podcast? Took a walk without tracking your steps?

If you want more ideas, you must allow more nothing. You must resist the anesthetic of the endlessly curated feed.

Let silence creep in. Let the inner monologue get weird. Trust that, given enough space, your brain will start filling in the gaps. That it wants to play, to imagine, to make. You just haven’t been letting it.

3. Obsess Over Questions, Not Answers

I think this is the main thing. The people who keep generating extraordinary, original work are not people who have found something; they are people who are haunted by something.

They are infected with a question.

What is identity if memory can be altered? What does it mean to be human in a post-biological era? What happens to love in the face of entropy?

These are not answerable questions. That’s the point. A good question gnaws at you. You chase it down across projects, across mediums. You revisit it in a short story, then in a novel, then in a video essay, then in the form of a sculpture you’re ashamed to talk about.

The more obsessed you are with the question, the more variations your mind will find. New angles. Fresh metaphors. The creativity doesn’t come from the pursuit of originality—it comes from the pursuit of understanding.

Which is really just to say: find the questions that break you open. And keep asking them in stranger and stranger ways.

4. Stay Moving

This is maybe the most practical advice I have.

Get up. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Clean something. Do the dishes. Get on your bike and go for a ride.

Something about locomotion—rhythmic, repetitive motion—gets the gears unstuck. It short-circuits the overthinking. It engages some parallel processing loop. Some of my best ideas (and I suspect yours too) arrive somewhere between miles one and two of a Zone 2 jog.

You don’t have to be an athlete. You just have to be in motion.

5. Give Yourself More Constraints

This one feels counterintuitive, but it’s important.

When you’re stuck, don’t try to “open up” the idea. Try narrowing it. Give yourself fewer tools. Fewer options. Smaller boxes.

Write a story in 500 words. Write a song with only three chords. Build a narrative that only uses second-person present tense and occurs within a single elevator ride. Draw the scene using only circles.

Creativity thrives in limitation. It needs friction. Resistance. Something to push against. Infinite possibility is not fertile ground—it is a blank canvas so blinding it paralyzes the hand.

6. Make It Ugly First

This is the one I struggle with most. You probably do too.

But perfection is a creativity killer. If you want more ideas, more breakthroughs, more genuine newness in your work, you must be willing to create garbage.

The first draft is a swamp. It should be a swamp. You’re wading through it with a headlamp and a notebook, trying to figure out what lives here. You’re not building the cathedral yet—you’re spelunking. Surveying. Taking notes in the dark.

So allow the mess. Invite the ugly. The act of making something—anything—is what keeps the idea channels open. You don’t wait until you have a great idea to start working. You start working, and the great idea stumbles in around hour four, confused but intrigued.

Here’s the thing they don’t tell you in school: the great idea isn’t the goal. It’s a side effect.

The real goal is to remain in process—to live, daily, in that trembling space between mystery and articulation. To become a faithful observer of the strange, the beautiful, and the broken. To listen. To follow. To show up.

The rest will come—but only if your door is open.

And the altar is swept.

I hold a certain sort of reverence for nonfiction books that can manage to be engaging in the same way fiction can be … books that can strike that balance between offering clarity and inspiring awe—in a word, they’re readable, and enjoyably so. Today, I want to talk about five of my favorite nonfiction reads.

Now, I have a background in science and astronomy, so I tend to gravitate toward nonfiction books with a scientific bent, so it’s probably not surprising that all five of these picks are directly science-related. When I was picking them out, I wanted to choose books that reshape perceptions, books that offer both general knowledge but also make you think. Each of these books, in their own way, has left a permanent mark on me. There’s everything from deeply human dramas of scientific discovery to the musings of mischievous geniuses. These are true stories that explain aspects of the world as well as make me grateful to be living in it.

5. Quantum by Manjit Kumar

The thing that so often makes popular science books fall flat is that they need to do two things at once: they need to precisely inform, and they need to stimulate further curiosity. Quantum by Manjit Kumar walks this tightrope about as well as I’ve seen. Manjit Kumar exhibits both the panache of a historical dramatist and the acuity of a theoretical physicist as he brilliantly and provocatively recounts the birth of quantum theory. This book shows that the journey from Newtonian simplicity to quantum chaos was both academic and personal, it was turbulent, and it was far more human than you might expect. We meet Einstein as more than just a set of theories with a funny mustache and a crazy haircut, but as a scorned skeptic, a man who refused to accept a universe ruled by chance. We follow Max Planck and Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger, and a veritable litany of others as they map out a world that refuses to play by deterministic rules. Quantum specifically asks two gnawing questions: “What is reality?” and “Can reality ever be truly known?”—two philosophical questions for the ages.

Honorable Mention:

As a sort of honorable mention, I feel like I need to also acknowledge When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut. It is technically fiction, but it’s built on the scaffolding of real events. Labatut dives deeply into the lives of some of the same figures Quantum explores … namely Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg … but instead of explaining their theories, he immerses us in the psychological and existential ramifications of their discoveries. It reads like a riveting fever dream. It’s unsettling and unforgettable. I highly recommend it.

4. The Scientists by John Gribbin

I first came across The Scientists by John Gribbin while I was taking a History of Science course during the sophomore year of my undergrad studies. I’d initially picked up the book just to pull a few quotes for a paper on the significance of the Scientific Revolution—but those excerpts were so engaging, so clearly and intelligently written, that I ended up leisure-reading the whole thing. Gribbin manages to turn what could have been a dry chronology into a captivating narrative of discovery as he traces centuries of scientific breakthroughs from Copernicus to Crick and Watson. It is ambitious and accessible, and just endlessly quotable—I found myself returning to it again and again in my studies for information and inspiration. It’s a kind of single-volume biography of science itself, and it’s wonderful.

Honorable Mention:

I feel I should also give an honorable mention here to Uncentering the Earth by William T. Vollmann. This was my second foray into Vollmann’s work—my first being The Atlas, which I picked up thanks to the always spot-on recommendations of Chris from Leaf by Leaf. In this book, Vollmann breathes new life into the familiar milestones of astronomical history. His writing is vibrant and curious and unflinchingly intelligent as he transforms the story of how we came to understand our place in the cosmos into something positively electric. If you’re even slightly interested in the history of astronomy, this one is an absolute joy.

3. Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible reads like a love letter to science fiction. I’ve been obsessed with Star Trek ever since I was a kid—largely thanks to my dad’s status as a lifelong Trekkie—and this book hits right at the heart of that obsession. Kaku takes classic sci-fi concepts like force fields and time travel and teleportation, and he explores whether they’re actually possible under the known laws of physics. His breakdown of the teleporter, in particular, is truly fascinating … and also mildly upsetting. But, y’know, even when he’s dashing childhood dreams, Kaku’s writing remains clear and approachable and terrifically paced. It’s without a doubt the most fun and accessible introduction to speculative physics I’ve ever read.

Honorable Mention:

Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip Thorne. While we’re on the subject of the physics of the impossible, I have to mention this one Black Holes & Time Warps by Kip Thorne—the physicist who helped make the black hole in Interstellar as scientifically accurate as possible. This book melds deep theoretical physics with a genuine narrative flair, and Dr. Thorne makes concepts like wormholes and time travel feel both mind-bending and deceptively understandable. It’s certainly dense, but it’s also rewarding.

2. The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene is the book that made me realize my grasp of spacetime was … tenuous at best. Dr. Greene writes with such audacious clarity that you actually begin to understand just how much you didn’t understand. He takes you deep into relativity and quantum mechanics and string theory, and even the multiverse … and he does so in a way that is astonishingly easy to follow. Concepts like quantum entanglement and spacetime foam … things that would otherwise feel impossibly abstract … they become surprisingly graspable under Greene’s guidance. It’s brain-bending in the best possible way.

Honorable Mention:

I do want to also give an honorable mention to The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll. I’m a huge fan of Dr. Carroll—I’m not a big podcast guy, but his Mindscape podcast is one I always try to make time for—but I will admit his writing leans just a touch more dense than Brian Greene’s, and is therefore slightly less accessible. Still, The Particle at the End of the Universe is an incredible account of the search for the Higgs boson, and it is told with the insight and intellectual generosity of someone who is both brilliant and passionate about helping others understand. He brings you behind the scenes of one of the most important discoveries in modern physics—and while it certainly makes you work a little harder, the payoff is absolutely worth it.

1. “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” by Richard P. Feynman

Topping my list is Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by the one and only Richard Feynman. If ever there was an educator who could take esoteric concepts and make them accessible, it’s Dick Feynman. This book is essentially a collection of anecdotes and misadventures, and digressions that, taken together, feel like a manifesto that insists that intellectual curiosity is its own reward. Feynman tackles complex ideas with the enthusiasm of a child trying to figure out how a magic trick works, and somehow, it all just clicks. This book is funny and sharp, and it’s deeply inspiring. Very few books celebrate curiosity with such charm.

Honorable Mention:

As a final honorable mention, I have to shout out Alex’s Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos. This is the book that made me appreciate and at least partially even enjoy mathematics. In this book, Alex Bellos dives into the history and philosophy of numbers with a genuinely contagious sense of wonder. He explores mathematical concepts in a way that’s engaging and accessible, and unexpectedly delightful. To my utter surprise, I even found inspiration in these pages for a novel that I’ve been feverishly working on ever since I read this one back in December of this past year. If you’ve ever thought math just wasn’t for you, this book might just change your mind.

Closing Thoughts

At their best, nonfiction books reframe the way we see the world. Every book I’ve talked about here gave me something beyond just facts or history or theory. They gave me stories. Stories of discovery, of doubt, of stubborn curiosity and the people bold enough to ask the big questions. They reminded me that science is less about answers and more about confronting the unknown. And whether it’s quantum physics or mathematical oddities or the personal lives of brilliant minds, each of these books left a lasting impression on me. If even one of them sounds interesting to you, it is my sincere hope that you’ll check it out—because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from reading these books, it’s that reality, when told well, can be every bit as mind-blowing as fiction.

There is no shortage of war stories in science fiction. Real-world conflicts are allegorized and translated into grandiose space operas where human bodies are broken or rebuilt or reshaped or turned into something else entirely. Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, John Steakley’s Armor, and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War all sit within this strange Venn diagram of speculative fiction: each one takes a different philosophical stance on how war shapes and distorts personal identity. Whether they know it or not, these novels are actually in dialogue with each other, with each book providing a distinct lens through which to view the “war story”:  Heinlein with his militaristic idealism, Haldeman with his anti-war disillusionment, Steakley with his existential dread, and Scalzi with his optimistic pragmatism. The protagonists of these novels may all wear futuristic armor and battle scary interstellar threats, but their psychological journeys diverge in ways that reflect not only the historical context of each book but also their authors’ varied philosophical commitments to authority, individual agency, and the nature of identity in times of war.

The Militarized Self: Starship Troopers and the Creation of Identity through Service

Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which was published in 1959, offers a militaristic view of identity, one where service in the armed forces functions as a rite of passage into full personhood. The protagonist, Johnny Rico, transforms from a callow youth into a hardened soldier, his sense of self becoming fully intertwined with military discipline and duty. In Heinlein’s universe, personal identity is not intrinsic but achieved through rigorous adherence to hierarchical authority and sacrifice for the collective good. Citizenship, in this world, is a reward for military service, implying that only those who serve are worthy of rights and recognition.

Heinlein’s militarism has sparked endless debates—some argue that the book endorses fascism, while others defend it as a nuanced exploration of civic responsibility. Either way, Starship Troopers suggests that war, far from stripping away identity, provides a structure within which identity is forged. The uniform isn’t a loss of individuality but a symbol of purpose, an identity to aspire toward. Rico’s transformation is complete when he no longer questions the system that shaped him; he becomes not just a soldier but a believer, someone who derives his sense of self-worth from his place within the military hierarchy.

The Fragmented Self: The Forever War and the Dislocation of Identity

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, published in 1974, was written as a reflection on the author’s experiences in Vietnam, and it presents a radically different view of war and identity. Where Heinlein saw war as a way to achieve personal fulfillment, Haldeman portrays it as a force that fractures identity and alienates soldiers from both themselves and society. William Mandella, the protagonist, returns from the interstellar conflict to find that the Earth he once knew has become unrecognizable. Through relativistic time dilation, centuries pass on Earth while only a few years pass for Mandella, making his reintegration impossible. War for Mandella isn’t a builder of identity; it is a thief that robs him of time, of relationships, and even the language of his native society.

Mandella’s experience reflects the disillusionment of soldiers who return home from war only to find that they no longer belong, and not only that, but often they no longer even recognize the world to which they are returning. Unlike Rico, Mandella does not emerge from the war with a clear sense of self. Instead, he feels adrift, as if the very notion of personal identity has eroded over time. The Forever War presents a world where war doesn’t just kill bodies; it kills continuity, rendering identity fragile and provisional. War isolates the soldier not just from others but from any stable sense of self, a poignant reflection of the alienation that many veterans experience in the aftermath of combat.

Armor and the Disposable Self: The Expendability of Identity

John Steakley’s Armor, published in 1984, takes the metaphor of armor quite literally, using it to explore the psychological mechanisms soldiers adopt to survive trauma. The protagonist, Felix, wears a suit of powered armor that enables him to slaughter alien hordes, but it also becomes a barrier between his humanity and the horrors of war. Felix’s survival depends on the creation of a secondary identity, a relentless killing machine he refers to as “The Engine.” This dissociative split between Felix’s core self and his combat persona reflects the ways in which trauma forces individuals to compartmentalize their experiences.

Steakley’s novel suggests that war requires soldiers to shed their humanity—not just temporarily but permanently. Felix never fully reclaims his original self after the war. His real identity becomes irrelevant; what matters is his ability to survive. Armor explores the idea that war transforms soldiers into expendable machines, stripping them of individuality and replacing it with the cold efficiency of violence. Where Starship Troopers sees identity as something to be built through service, Armor implies that the soldier’s true self must be buried, sacrificed for the sake of survival. What emerges is not a coherent identity at all but a shattered psyche, haunted by the realization that the first casualty of war was the self.

Old Man’s War and the Fluidity of Identity

Finally, John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, published in 2005, offers a more playful and optimistic take on the relationship between war and identity, though it doesn’t shy away from the psychological complexities involved. In Scalzi’s universe, elderly humans are given new, genetically enhanced bodies to fight in interstellar wars. John Perry, the protagonist, literally gets a new lease on life—his mind transferred into a younger, stronger body designed for combat. This rejuvenation allows Perry to grapple with questions of identity in ways that are both literal and metaphorical: Who are we when our bodies change? Can we still be ourselves when we become something fundamentally different?

Unlike Steakley’s Felix, who loses himself in the machinery of war, Perry retains his sense of humor and moral compass, even as he grapples with the physical and emotional demands of combat. Scalzi’s novel suggests that identity is not fixed but adaptable, capable of surviving profound transformations. The process of becoming a soldier in Old Man’s War involves change, but it does not require the obliteration of the self. Perry’s journey is one of integration—he learns to reconcile his new body and role as a soldier with his memories and values from his former life.

At the same time, Scalzi’s work reflects a certain skepticism toward institutions of power. Perry’s autonomy is constantly at risk, threatened by the military bureaucracy and the demands of war. Yet, Old Man’s War offers the hope that identity can be fluid without being lost—that even in the midst of war, it is possible to remain human.

The Soldier as Everyman: Collective vs. Individual Identity

A key theme that emerges across these four novels is the tension between collective identity and individual selfhood. Starship Troopers champions the idea that personal identity is best realized through service to the collective. In contrast, The Forever War presents the collective as a force of alienation, one that erodes the individual’s sense of self. Armor goes a step further, suggesting that the collective doesn’t just subsume the individual—it annihilates it, leaving only survival mechanisms in its wake. Old Man’s War, however, offers a more nuanced view, positing that individual identity can survive within the collective as long as it remains adaptable.

This tension reflects the authors’ differing philosophical and historical contexts. Heinlein wrote in the shadow of World War II, when the notion of collective sacrifice was celebrated. Haldeman, by contrast, was grappling with the disillusionment of the Vietnam War, where soldiers returned home to find themselves alienated from the society they had fought for. Steakley’s novel, with its focus on psychological trauma, anticipates the more recent discourse around PTSD and the difficulty of reintegration. Scalzi, writing in the post-9/11 era, reflects a world where personal identity is in flux, constantly negotiated between physical realities and virtual possibilities.

War as a Mirror for Identity

Taken together, these four novels reveal the many ways that war reshapes, fragments, and redefines identity. Heinlein’s Rico finds himself through military service, his identity forged in the fires of duty. Haldeman’s Mandella, on the other hand, loses himself in the endless churn of war, his sense of self eroded by time and isolation. Steakley’s Felix discovers that survival comes at the cost of identity, while Scalzi’s Perry learns that identity can survive transformation—but only if it isn’t resistant to change.

War, in these narratives, functions not just as a backdrop but as a crucible for identity. It demands that individuals confront the boundaries of selfhood and decide what can be sacrificed and what must be preserved. Whether war ultimately builds or destroys identity remains an open question, one that each of these novels answers in a different way. The answer, it seems, depends not only on the nature of the war but on the nature of the individual who fights it.

In the end, these novels suggest that identity is both a weapon and a shield. For some, like Rico, it is something to be sharpened through discipline and service. For others, like Mandella and Felix, it is a fragile thing, easily shattered by the violence of war. And for those like Perry, it is a constant work-in-progress, a reminder that even in the darkest moments, the self is never entirely lost—it can always be found again, though perhaps in a new and unexpected form.

Y’know, reading the Earthseed Saga really got me thinking. There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a bookstore or scroll through Goodreads, hoping to stumble upon something interesting or new, something you’ve either never heard of before or something you keep hearing about but haven’t picked up yet … and, almost invariably, you’re struck by the ubiquity of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres. It’s not subtle: completely overgrown ruins of cities; smoldering wastelands; authoritarian regimes with catchy slogans like Freedom is Slavery; climate-ravaged hellscapes; plucky, scrappy survivors decked out in scavenged gear. It’s everywhere, and it’s not just relegated to literature. There’s no shortage of it on TV and in film, in video games, in tabletop RPGs. You could say that these are the stories of our time. And, to be honest, they are. But what I want to explore here isn’t why they’re so popular as much as why we are drawn to them in the first place. Whether it’s Orwell or Atwood or Butler or Bradbury, why do we get all tingly inside at the thought of the world unraveling?

A Brief History of the End

Dystopias and post-apocalypses, as literary forms, are not exactly new, right? I mean, most of the time they feel modern, but the truth is, humanity has been fantasizing about the downfall of society for a long time. We could argue that this all began, really, with the last book of the Bible: Revelation. That book alone, with its harbinger horsemen, rivers of blood, and flaming trumpets of doom, may have set the standard for imagining the world at its darkest. Of course, in those earlier days, an apocalypse was seen as more of a religious purge, a sort of purifying catastrophe that cleansed the world of sin and evil, I mean, see the story of Noah and the flood all the way back in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, for another example of this.

Jump ahead a few thousand years, and we enter the Age of Enlightenment. Suddenly, the apocalypse wasn’t necessarily God smiting the wicked; it was us, humankind, bringing it all down upon ourselves. Cue Mary Shelley’s The Last Man in 1826, a novel that, by today’s standards, is kind of a proto-post-apocalyptic tale. It was here we see the roots of what would later become a common trope in science fiction: humans, with all their technological prowess, their dreams of control, fumbling the ball and making things irreversibly worse. Shelley’s novel was followed by more of these “dark future” stories as industrialization, war, and the swift rise of science began to spark not just hope for the future, but insufferable amounts of anxiety.

Fast forward to the 20th century, and we start to get some of the heavy hitters: E. M. Forster’s underrated The Machine Stops, Zamyatin’s influential We, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. These works are all unmistakable in their pessimism about the human condition. They imagine futures where systems of control, dehumanization, the loss of individual agency, it’s all taken to terrifying extremes. And yet, despite their bleakness, we read them. We love them! And the trend continued into the post-apocalyptic, from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. These stories strike us not only because they feel plausible, but because there’s something deeply human about wondering: What would we do if it all fell apart?

Catastrophizing as a Cultural Pastime

Which brings us to the question: Why? Why, when we sit down to read, do we so often reach for dystopias and apocalyptic tales? Shouldn’t we be leaning into, I don’t know, hopeful futures, given that life is stressful enough without imagining it all going up in flames? But here’s the thing. If we’re being honest, humans are pretty bad at imagining true utopias. They’re boring, they’re narratively dull because they lack conflict, and as readers, we thrive on conflict. When there’s nothing at stake, there’s no story. 

In fact, there’s a reason why most literary utopias end up being thinly veiled dystopias. We can’t seem to accept that a perfect world, a world where everything runs smoothly, wouldn’t turn against us in some horrific way. It’s like we don’t trust perfection. We need to see it fall apart. There’s something cathartic in imagining political systems, technological systems, environmental systems … systems that are supposed to be too big to fail, failing spectacularly.

Part of it, of course, comes from that previously mentioned anxiety, right? Something that, arguably, we as a species have always had in spades, but made worse in the post-industrial age. If you chart the rise of dystopian and apocalyptic literature, you’ll notice that these stories tend to spike around times of unrest, be it cultural, political, or economic. Orwell, for instance, was deeply informed by the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Post-apocalyptic fiction found a resurgence after the two World Wars and the rise of nuclear tension. It’s no coincidence that these genres are flourishing now, in a time of climate crisis; of extreme political polarization; and rapid, seemingly uncontrollable technological growth.

Whether they’re about nuclear fallout or ecological collapse or technological enslavement, these stories are ways of processing our collective fears. When we read about these dark futures, there’s a part of our brain that’s trying to make sense of the chaos around us, trying to imagine what could happen, if only to prepare for the worst. But I think it’s not just about catharsis, right? There’s something more than just subconscious crisis management happening when we pick up these books.

A Complicated Kind of Hope

Oddly enough, as much as we love a good dystopia, I don’t think it’s the darkness that keeps us coming back, not really. It’s the hope that simmers beneath it all. Take Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for example. On the surface, it’s about as bleak as fiction can get. A father and his son, wandering through a charred landscape, scavenging for food and fending off cannibals. But the core of the novel isn’t about the apocalypse—it’s about love, it’s about survival, it’s about the unbreakable bond between the two main characters. McCarthy’s world may be brutal, but there’s something transcendent in their struggle to survive.

Similarly, 1984, for all its bleakness, is not as nihilistic as it may appear. It’s a warning, sure, but it’s also a call to awareness, to resistance. Dystopias, in their most impactful moments, are acts of rebellion against complacency. They implore us to confront what we might become if we don’t push back against forces like authoritarianism, against environmental destruction, against the numbing effects of technology. The best dystopian works, the ones that stay with us, aren’t really about despair. They’re about the glimmer of hope that persists even in the darkest of times. They’re about the potential for change.

And this is, I think, one of the main reasons why we’re so drawn to these stories. Dystopias and post-apocalypses aren’t about the end of the world, they’re about what happens after. They’re about survival, they’re about people clawing their way through the ruins and, in many cases, trying to build something new. Even in the most pessimistic scenarios, there’s always this underlying question: What would you do? How would you fight? How would you survive? What kind of person would you become if the structures of civilization were stripped away?

The Human Condition in Extremis

In a way, these stories are about exploring the human condition in its most extreme form. When everything we rely on, our governments, our infrastructures, our technology, falls apart, what remains? Who are we, really, when the rules no longer apply? Science fiction, and particularly dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, allows us to test these boundaries without real-world consequences, thank God. We can explore these nightmarish futures from the safety of our reading chairs, knowing that we’ll emerge on the other side physically unscathed.

But it’s also about possibility. There’s an unspoken belief, I think, that we read these stories not just to indulge in the thrill of disaster, but because we are genuinely curious about what comes next. If the world as we know it ends, what new forms of society might emerge? How might we reinvent ourselves? These stories, as bleak as they can be, also remind us that the end of one world could mean the beginning of another.

Conclusion

So, why are we drawn to dark futures? I don’t think it’s because we’re nihilists or sadists or because we enjoy watching the world burn. I think it’s because these stories tap into something fundamental about the human experience. They allow us to confront our fears, to imagine the worst-case scenario, and, in many cases, to see a way through it. Sure, they’re cautionary tales, but they’re also tales of survival. They reflect our anxieties, our mistrust of power, our fear of unchecked technological progress; but they also reflect our deep-seated need for hope, even in the most ridiculously desolate circumstances. At the end of the day, we are creatures of story. And the most compelling stories are the ones that don’t shy away from the darkness, but take us right to the edge of oblivion, and then pull us back.

When Riemann pulled into his parking spot the mist was still tight over the quad like gauze over a fresh wound. The sun was still making a spectacle of rising over the collegiate sprawl of Cornell University, golden rays shining through the tangled canopy of oaks overhead as wind whispered with the voice of rustling autumn leaves. He stepped out of his vintage Volvo wrapped in a wool coat that made him look vaguely monastic, and he surveyed the campus with pale, watery blue eyes that had the unsettling quality of being both intensely observant and indifferently distant, as though taking inventory of each blade of grass, not by its shade of green but by its angular defiance against the geometry of the lawn. He moved with the gait of a man who had once been an athlete, or at least an enthusiastic weekend jogger, but whose knees and convictions had since conspired to divest him of the habit. His midsection wasn’t soft, not exactly, but it carried an insidious thickness, the kind that implied he spent more time behind a desk than astride an exercise bike. The crown of his head was a barren peninsula surrounded by a thinning sea of sandy-brown hair, meticulously combed to distract from the follicular retreat.

Born in a Midwestern town whose name was so generic it might as well have been generated by an algorithm, Riemann had always seemed a man with one foot in the soil and the other in abstraction. His Scotch affinity, born of evenings spent nursing single malts in the company of textbooks and Bach, betrayed a heritage he knew only through the glossy brochure of direct-to-consumer genetic testing and the awkward braggadocio of distant uncles. When asked about his roots, he would cock his head like a terrier and say “Scottish,” with a bemused air, as if the notion itself were an inside joke between him and the ghosts of the Highlands. His clean-shaven face bore a paleness that suggested he spent more time in front of the glow of a computer screen than under the warmth of the sun. His skin was punctuated by fine lines that hinted at a life spent squinting at small text and bigger problems, as well as by a perpetual redness on the bridge of his nose from glasses he pushed back in perpetuity. His eyes, a pale, watery blue, carried the sharpness of someone who could analyze a conversation as quickly as a dataset, and often with less patience for error. Standing there in the gauzy light of the morning, coat buttoned to the neck as if warding off some existential draft, Riemann was a man at once unremarkable and impossible to ignore. He exuded a peculiar gravity, the sort that made people pause mid-thought when he entered a room, unsure whether to fear his judgment or invite it. He had about him the air of a man who had read too many books and lived too few of their lessons, and his presence seemed less like something you encountered and more like a sudden realization you’d been trying to avoid.

Malott Hall, home to the Department of Mathematics, stood with the resolute, modernist simplicity of mid-century architecture. Built in 1963, its pale concrete façade and long, utilitarian windows overlooked the quad with an air of apathetic permanence. Inside, the sterile corridors hummed with the sound of fluorescent lights and the muffled footsteps of students scurrying to early lectures. Riemann’s office was on the third floor, a narrow room that smelled of dry paper and black tea left forgotten on a windowsill, its only decoration a sprawling whiteboard with manic scrawlings that could be mistaken for the ravings of a madman or the compositions of a genius, depending on who was looking at it. It was covered edge to edge with yesterday’s equations, each staggering into the other like drunken revelers at a festival.

He sat at his desk—a topographical nightmare of stacked papers, open books, nearly spent pens, empty mugs, crumpled sticky notes scrawled with half-formed equations, a cracked protractor, a slide rule yellowed with age, a jar of paperclips, a small framed photo commemorating the occasion when he had the great fortune of meeting Sir Roger Penrose. He held his gaze on a particular equation that always seemed to catch his eye:

The golden ratio—that curious number which arises when the universe slouches slightly toward beauty rather than brute functionality; the peculiar order to which his beloved Penrose tiling, with its quadrilateral kites and darts (those shapes that conspire to form an infinite, aperiodic rebellion against the tiresome tyranny of regularity) is beholden. The angles—72° here, 36° there—dictate the blueprint, an eternal structure where no pattern ever recurs. The angles—72° here, 36° there—dictate the blueprint, an eternal structure where no pattern ever recurs.

Yet this isn’t chaos—it’s a precise, deliberate unfolding, each kite and dart giving rise to others, constrained by their geometry into forms that seem self-replicating yet never truly repeat. Like an ouroboros of angles and vertices, their interplay is dictated by rules that forbid some combinations while compelling others, constructing a vast, intricate architecture of order within apparent randomness. 

You could chart it with equations if you liked, perhaps something involving phi multiplied by the cosine of theta and an iterative algorithm, but it’s not the math that matters—what matters is the way it refuses to submit to grids or reason, a pattern that mocks the very idea of pattern, infinite and strange as the stars themselves.

“Doctor Riemann,” a voice interrupted his reverie. The door creaked as it opened to reveal Dana Malach, a graduate student whose undaunted dedication to her research was equaled only by her sharp wit and unapologetic directness. Dana served as Riemann’s research assistant, and he returned the favor by acting as her faculty sponsor, supervising her thesis research.

“Miss Malach,” Riemann acknowledged without turning. He waved a hand toward a nearby chair, cluttered with old issues of The Mathematical Intelligencer and a cracked mug bearing the slogan There’s No Place Like Home (in Hilbert Space). She brushed the debris aside, sat with a huff, and adjusted her glasses, which had a habit of slipping down her nose at the most inopportune moments. The frames were unassuming, sleek black with understated gold accents, striking a careful balance between pragmatism and elegance. Their oversized lenses gave her a sharp, owlish air, accentuating her intellectual presence. Yet, in the play of light and angle, they subtly transformed the shape of her eyes, lending them a delicate slant that seemed almost foreign—an optical illusion, perhaps, but one that hinted, fleetingly, at something curious and unknowable. Coupled with her tousled dark hair and porcelain complexion, the overall effect was undeniably alluring.

“I’ve reviewed the first draft of your paper,” she began, voice thin as wire, stretched taut by the weight of unspoken hesitations. “The one on integrating out M2 states and the connection to Penrose tiling geometries. It’s … compelling, to say the least.”

Compelling. The word rolled around in his mind, a warm, ironic touch that contrasted starkly with the cold logic of the equations by which he lived. His eyes darted to her hands as she gestured, slim fingers tracing invisible patterns in the air. A dissonant thought sparked in his mind—uninvited, unwelcome—but he crushed it beneath the weight of self-reprimand. Control, Sebastian.

Riemann smirked, a tight, humorless thing that made her shift in her seat. “Compelling,” he echoed, testing the heft of the word as if it might reveal something about her—or him. “Did you spot the anomaly in section four?”

Dana pursed her lips. “The assumption about the connection between the duality symmetry in the free energy and the aperiodic structure of Penrose tilings? I did. I think it needs more proof, especially if you’re suggesting—”

“I’m not suggesting,” he cut in, eyes finally snapping to hers with a startling sharpness. “I’m outright stating. The duality isn’t a coincidence—it’s the framework. There’s a pattern beneath the chaos. You can’t see it, not yet, but when you do…” His voice trailed off, leaving her grasping at the silence that followed.

She blinked twice, then her expression hardened. “It needs more proof,” she asserted. 

She gathered her notes, and Riemann couldn’t help but let his gaze linger a moment longer than necessary. Her movements were graceful, each delicate flick of her wrist as she stacked the papers sending a jolt of awareness through him. The way her hair fell in soft waves around her face, the slight furrow of concentration on her brow, all of it combined to create a captivating image that he found hard to tear his eyes away from. His thoughts strayed to places they shouldn’t, imagining what it would be like to run his fingers through that silky dark hair, to feel the warmth of her Victorian skin under his touch. He shook his head, trying to dispel the inappropriate fantasies that threatened to take root in his mind. With a quick cough to clear his throat, he forced himself to look away as she finished gathering her things and left the room.

Outside, students milled about, their laughter and complaints mixing with the gentle drone of leaf blowers. Riemann barely heard them. The world outside his office was an echo chamber of trivialities—weekend plans, awkward flirtations, the banal melodrama of youth. Here, in this sanctuary of chalk dust and crumpled graph paper, he existed on a higher plane, where numbers weren’t just numbers but keys to a kingdom he alone could envision. The clock on the wall ticked like a metronome, each beat a reminder of time slipping away. His mind was already buzzing with new possibilities. Dana’s words lingered in the air, ripe with doubt and skepticism—but he had grown accustomed to the ebb and flow of skepticism and revelation, each rejection fueling his obsession further. The Penrose tilings beckoned to him, their intricate patterns whispering secrets he felt only he could decipher. Fractals danced behind his closed eyelids, where kites and darts morphed into celestial shapes, weaving a fabric that transcended dimensions. The world around him faded away, leaving only the pulsating hum of numbers resonating in his ears. He would unlock the hidden geometry of the universe, he had no doubt. Peer review be damned, Riemann often thought. He would show them all. The critics who dismissed his theories as flights of fancy—who dismissed him as a circle-squarer—would soon have no choice but to yield to the brilliance of his discoveries.

The heavy metal door to Riemann’s office once again creaked on its old hinges. He looked up to see Sabine standing in the doorway, a vision of elegance and intellect, her presence commanding attention even in the cluttered chaos of Riemann’s office.

“Sebastian,” she spoke softly. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

Riemann scrambled to bring himself back to reality as he gestured for her to enter. “Not at all, Sabine. Please, come in.”

Doctor Sabine Eraclito moved into the room like an idea taking shape in the mind, her steps both deliberate and hesitant, as if testing the ground for philosophical solidity. She paused just inside the doorway, glancing at the scattered ruins of Riemann’s workspace. Her gaze lingered on the whiteboard, the sprawling lattice of equations that seemed to crawl and spread like ivy on the wall, then on the bookshelves groaning under the weight of dense tomes, their spines embossed with arcane titles. “You live as if entropy were an aesthetic,” she said, her voice lilting with amusement. She adjusted the strap of her leather satchel, a bag so worn and patched that it seemed more artifact than accessory. “I am assuming that’s the point, no?”

Riemann leaned back in his chair, his fingers steepled beneath his chin. “If you’re here to critique my office, Sabine, you’re about two semesters too late. Dana’s already conducted a full rhetorical takedown—complete with visual aids, no less!”

Sabine let a laugh escape, soft and melodic, rich with that distinct Italian warmth. It was a laugh that seemed to belong in better, fresher air than what wafted here. “Ah, but no! I am here to make sure you have not forgotten tonight’s concert. Remember? Viktor’s brilliant idea to, how does he put it, ‘expand our intellectual palettes.’ Which is to say, an excuse for him to argue with the musicians during intermission.”

“The concert. Right. Viktor and his crusade against polytonality.”

“Esatto!” Sabine said, stepping closer to his desk and leaning on its edge with casual familiarity. “And tonight, he will have quite the sparring partner. Jules Cardini is the headliner. You know, the most avant-garde modernist composer since—well, take your pick. Schönberg, Xenakis, maybe Ives on a particularly mischievous day. His Symphony for the Age of Dust has been called his most daring work. Even Cardini’s critics are begrudgingly calling it visionary.”

Riemann smirked as his fingers tapped a rhythm against the arm of his chair. “Ah, yes. Cardini. The one who supposedly composes by algorithm and claims his music is a reflection of the universe’s inherent futility.”

“Precisely why you will love it,” Sabine countered. “Besides, you promised. And if this does not sway you, we are going for drinks after. Viktor found some obscure place with cocktails named after mathematical conjectures. I think one of them involves gin and a Möbius strip. Intriguing, no?”

Riemann chuckled. “So you came here to strong-arm me into an evening of nihilistic symphonies and overpriced beverages.”

“But of course. What are friends for?” Sabine perched herself on the corner of his desk, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The sunlight filtering through the narrow window cast sharp, geometric shadows across her face, accentuating her distinctly Mediterranean features—the elegant curve of an aquiline nose, high cheekbones that carried a whisper of Renaissance sculptures, and dark, expressive eyes that seemed to hold entire libraries of unspoken thought. “You have been buried in this,” she gestured broadly at the equations and books, “for how many months now? You need a break, Sebastian. Even Grothendieck had to stop and have a spritzer every once in a while, no?”

Riemann’s smirk faded, replaced by something more thoughtful. “Do you ever wonder,” he began, lowering his voice, “if the things we study, the patterns we chase—they’re leading exactly nowhere? That maybe the answers we’re looking for aren’t answers at all, but walls we keep running into because it’s just impossible for us to imagine the absence of a door?”

Sabine’s dark eyes narrowed to slits. “You are speaking of Gödel now, no? The idea that no system, no matter how elegant, can ever fully explain itself?”

Riemann nodded. “Cardini might have a point. The futility of it all. Not in the sense that it’s meaningless, but that meaning itself might be a mirage.”

Sabine let the silence stretch for a moment, her expression contemplative. “Ah, and yet,” she said softly, “we keep looking, don’t we? For doors. For cracks in the wall. Perhaps it’s not about finding them, but the act of searching itself.”

Riemann chuffed. “But is that enough? Will that ever be enough?”

“The universe does not owe us its secrets, Sebastian. The act of searching is the only answer it has ever freely given.” She smiled warmly. “That will be enough if you let it.” Her words hung in the air, a kind of philosophical benediction that neither of them dared disturb. Finally, she straightened, brushed an invisible speck of dust from her skirt, and turned to leave.

“Be ready by seven,” she said, her tone light but her eyes still bearing the load of their conversation. “And please do not wear that coat. It makes you look like you have taken a vow of silence.”

Riemann watched her go. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and staring once more at the endless sprawl of equations on the whiteboard. The golden ratio. The Penrose tiles. The kites and the darts. He thought of Sabine’s words, of doors and walls, of cracks and light. And for the first time in weeks, he felt the stirrings of something that seemed like hope—or possibly inspiration, which was, perhaps, even better.