A Year in Links and Books

On Tolstoy, China, and reading with abandon

It remains to be seen whether links posts will become a regular feature on this blog, but December (my favorite month of the year) seems to demand one. For four years its arrival signaled that, just like the birds who fly south for winter, I too would go to warmer pastures, trading walks through the slushy snow for comfortable outdoor naps in the gentle winter sun. But, weather aside, what I (truly) look forward to the most is the abundance of year-end retrospectives.¹ Here is mine:

Note: this is non-exhaustive and almost certainly subject to some recency bias.

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Fiction

The best book I read this year was unquestionably Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (or “book of books” per Henry Oliver).² War and Peace is next on the list, but I am pacing myself; I now understand what it means when they say that you never get to read something for the first time twice. In the interim, I have been working my way through many of his short stories: Kreutzer Sonata, Master and Man, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich were among my favourites. I also quite enjoyed “Tolstoy at Home,” a rather wonderful profile on the author from 1891.

Other classics that were particularly delightful reads included Dostoevsky’s White Nights, Albert Camus’ The Stranger (somewhat absurd to confront a character of such a mechanical interiority), and Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey.

I also read some contemporary fiction. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian was by far the most memorable – despite dealing with rather grotesque (?) themes, it is very well paced. This is in contrast to Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, which is much slower. However, if you do away with the expectation of a quickly accelerating storyline, it becomes easy to appreciate the finer world-building where the author reveals so much about the anxieties and idiosyncrasies of postwar Britain.

Nonfiction

The first half of this year was spent almost exclusively writing my undergraduate thesis,³ where I looked into the tendency to ascribe aesthetic terms, such as beautiful or elegant, to mathematical discovery. For practical reasons, I focused on turn-of-the-20th-century France as my model case and approached the period with the hypothesis that there must have been some shared philosophical or practical motivators that explained (in part) the use of such descriptors by both scientific practitioners and artists. Some stuff I read during the process that was particularly fun and helpful includes Sue Rose’s The Secret Lives of the Impressionists and Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Related: Ulkar Aghayeva wrote a wonderful essay on what makes an experiment beautiful.⁴

Another project this year had included an end-of-the-year trip to China (which unfortunately had to be tabled at the last moment). In preparation, Abby ShalekBriski and I started a small discussion group. We read Dan Wang’s Breakneck, which was a very good primer – I particularly enjoyed Chapter 2 where he recounts the pros and cons of the ‘build, baby, build’ mindset through the lens of a bike trip across the country. Chapter 4, on the One-Child policy is perhaps the most informative part of the book and emotionally gut-wrenching to boot (see Hollis Robbin’s review). Patrick McGee’s Apple in China was also a delightful read with important context on how the country came to set up its manufacturing empire (also see the author’s ChinaTalk interview and, tangentially, Karina Bao’s unofficial translation of Morris Chang’s memoir). Lastly, on the China front, Jasmine Sun’s retrospective from her trip there was excellent, as is Afra Wang’s blog (and here is a list of the best China books of 2025).

I have also been doing a fair bit of India reading since moving back. This has included the William Irvine translation of Niccolao Manucci’s Storia do Mogor (Italian spy writes a firsthand account of his experiences in Mughal India) – I was tempted to pick it up after reading this review from the pSmiths. Ramchandra Guha’s Makers of Modern India and India After Gandhi also came highly recommended, and although I haven’t finished either yet, they have been quite enjoyable so far. On the shorter side, Soham Sankaran’s substack post on overcoming India’s technological cowardice is very comprehensive.

The last big grouping of my reading can be filed under the metascience tag. This includes Vannevar Bush’s Pieces of the Action, Jennet Conant’s Tuxedo Park, James Phinney Baxter III’s Scientists Against Time,⁵ and Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency. I also read my fair share of blog pieces on the general theme of making science better: Karthik Tadepalli on why ideas aren’t getting harder to find, Eric Gilliam on Warren Weaver’s contribution to molecular biology, Stuart Buck on the need for crazy philanthropy, Elizabeth Van Nostrand on the (not so) boring part of Bell Labs, Brian Potter on accidental invention, and Alvin Djajadikerta and Laura Lungu on why science needs outsiders.

Misc

On the built environment: I enjoyed Benedict Springbett’s take that the product of the railways is the timetable. Coby Lefkowitz’s recent article on how New York killed culture is also great (and I learnt more about the city after a two-hour walk with him than in three years of living there), as is Alex Chalmer’s historical look-back on the French success with nuclear energy.

Abhishaike Mahajan writes perhaps the best technical biology blog out there. My favorites over the past year have included: endometriosis is an incredibly interesting disease, why you should work in biology, and cancer has a surprising amount of detail.

Other publications I admire include Karthik Tadepalli’s new literary substack (I don’t know how to define the genre, but it is stuff I can imagine one having fun writing) and Chen Chen Li’s Dendrite, an all-around excellent publication on neuroscience.

Earlier this year, I was contemplating a PhD in the history of science – and although academia has been tabled for now, I am still quite drawn to the prospect of spending my twenties reading beautiful books in beautiful places. Meeting D. Graham Burnett during a fateful visit to Princeton salvaged my sense of what that life could look like. He also wrote a very good take on AI in the humanities, from the perspective of someone deeply integrated within the academy.⁶

On fertility: Ruxandra Teslo made a compelling argument on how reproductive technology can help women narrow the career/motherhood tradeoff, while Phoebe Arslanagić-Little describes the many factors behind South Korea’s cratering birth rate.

Some final thoughts on books:

I quite enjoy reading about the mechanics of how someone does their job (Smrithi Sunil articulates it better than I do) and particularly liked Henrik Karlsson’s How I read:

“Of the roughly 300 books I start each year, I finish about 50. I skim a lot. Books are not sacred…Reading well is an endurance sport. I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained. They often lose their enthusiasm for reading. By reading within my comfort zone, I gradually build up my stamina and pick up more and more references, words, and patterns of thought, bringing more and more literature into my comfort zone.”

I am a strong believer in abandoning books rather ruthlessly; this has become even more important since I began treating reading as my job (writing, the action, is secondary and makes up a small fraction of the time I spend on each essay). I have, therefore, built up something of an imperfect but functional system that lets me read without losing steam. The crux of it relies on doing away with annotation – introducing a writing supplement prematurely creates needless friction that almost certainly costs me both speed and interest. Instead, I rely on those skinny plastic post-it notes and tack them on the edge of whatever paragraph feels important (a color-coded organization emerges naturally during the process as I become cognizant of the general themes) and move on(!). Then it is light work to go back through the tabs – it’s quite freeing.

Lastly, I am very grateful to those who have read and engaged with my work so far. Please do email me (hiya [at] mundane [dot] beauty) if you have feedback, ideas, or reading recommendations for the new year!

With thanks to Abby ShalekBriski and Venkatesh Ranjan for feedback on drafts.

Cover Image: Samuel F.B. Morse, Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33, Terra Foundation for American Art [Wiki Media Commons].

1. These posts are almost always teeming with excellent book recommendations and the writing rarely lacks in personality – they are an all-round delight. Some of my favorites include Henry Oliver’s great books round-up, Sam Enright’s anti-review, and Shruti Rajagopalan’s annual reading list.

2. The Constance Garnett translation (from modern library classics). My experience was also much improved because of Adam Lehodey who not only lent me his thoroughly annotated copy, but also served as an excellent interlocutor during the reading process.

3. “This thesis argues that beauty served as a critical epistemic tool in late nineteenth-century mathematics: an intuitive compass that trained mathematicians to choose between competing claims to truth in an era where it became clear that formal systems could not guarantee completeness or certainty. Across three chapters, I trace how aesthetic judgment functioned not only as a personal sensibility but as a shared heuristic for navigating this foundational ambiguity. The through-line, thus, is found in the transformation of beauty from a source of internal discomfort, such as in Euclidean geometry, to a logic of mathematical discovery, as seen in Henri Poincaré’s own breakthroughs, to a cultural medium through which abstract ideas entered artistic modernism.”

4. “While every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is, these features are rarely put into words. Nor is the answer static, and like aesthetic values more generally, these features changed throughout scientific history.”

5. These were particularly useful resources when I was writing The Tower of Science and A Case Study in Scientific Coordination (both for The Good Science Project).

6. “Then I popped in my earbuds and listened as a chirpy synthetic duo—one male, one female—dished for thirty-two minutes about my course. What can I say? Yes, parts of their conversation were a bit, shall we say, middlebrow. Yes, they fell back on some pedestrian formulations (along the lines of “Gee, history really shows us how things have changed”). But they also dug into a fiendishly difficult essay by an analytic philosopher of mind…and handled it surprisingly well, even pausing to acknowledge the tricky pronunciation of certain terms in Pali. As I rinsed a pot, I thought, A-minus. But it wasn’t over. Before I knew it, the cheerful bots began drawing connections between Kantian theories of the sublime and “The Epic Split” ad—with genuine insight and a few well-placed jokes. I removed my earbuds. O.K. Respect, I thought. That was straight-A work.”