Murray Gell-Mann enjoys re-reading The Quark and the Jaguar (Abacus,
1995), but since he鈥檚 the author this doesn鈥檛 really count. Finnegans
Wake by James Joyce (Viking Penguin, 1999) comes close. It鈥檚 where Gell-Mann
first came across the word 鈥渜uark鈥�, the name he adopted for the discovery for
which he won a Nobel prize in 1969.
Away from science, Gell-Mann reads the Latin poetry of Ovid and Catullus. He
also likes Chaucer, Shakespeare and Marcia Southwick, author of A Saturday
Night at the Flying Dog (Oberlin College Press, 1999)鈥攁nd his wife.
For imaginative fiction, Gell-Mann recommends the books of Thomas Pynchon. A
particular favourite is Mason & Dixon (Vintage, 1998). It鈥檚 about a
surveyor and an astronomer who drafted the boundary separating Pennsylvania from
the American South in the 1760s.