Books that glow
I’ve read a lot of books on math, physics and various tech topics. Most of them were fine. They contained what they promised to contain, I worked through them, I got what I needed. And then there were a few that were glowing.
I don’t have a better word for it. Some books glow. You open them and within a page or two you know you’re in good hands. You feel at home. The book invites you in and says: look at what I have seen. I want you to see it too. I won’t let you get lost.
My list is not long. Herbert Callen’s Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics. Cornelius Lanczos’s The Variational Principles of Mechanics. Richard Mattuck’s A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem. The math books by Klaus Jänich. And a few others.
This might just be my personal taste. During my studies I had colleagues who preferred the dry, human-purged kind of book: statements and formulas, nothing else. But I don’t think dryness excludes glowing. Even a terse text still had to be arranged by someone. Someone decided what comes first, what gets its own line, what gets left out. The quantum mechanics lecture notes by Maximilian Kreuzer were extremely terse, and to me they were glowing. There was a person with profound understanding in there, in the ordering of it.
I don’t actually know how a book glows. I can only imagine it’s some form of caring. The author was thinking about how the reader would feel moving through the pages. Not just about being correct, not just about being complete, but about what it would be like to be on the other side of the text, coming through it for the first time, confused, hoping this is going somewhere.
Maybe that is what I’m really sensing when a book glows: a person on the other side who cared. In a time when more and more text is generated, I think that becomes more precious, not less.
So when you write, let your readers feel at home.