鈥淕ood books always shock us at some level,鈥� says 础濒产别谤迟-尝谩蝉锄濒贸-叠补谤补产谩蝉颈, professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and author of Linked: The new science of networks (Perseus, 2002). He鈥檚 grappling with The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq (Vintage, 2001). It presents a world that is just as repulsive as it is natural, he says. 鈥淚 could not read the book continuously. I was so repelled by it that sometimes I would put it down and take it up only days or weeks later.鈥� The question posed by Houellebecq cannot leave any scientist unmoved: What is the road to happiness 鈥� sex or science?
Another 鈥渇ascinating but painful鈥� read is Fateless by Imre Kertesz (Hydra, 1992). 鈥淚t is particularly painful if [the literature Nobel Prize] goes to one of your countrymen, and you realise that while you did hear his name, you never actually read anything by him.鈥� He says he鈥檚 catching up, starting with Kertesz鈥檚 first major novel, in Hungarian.
On the science front, Barab谩si鈥檚 favourite read that he can never finish is Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts and others (Garland, 1994): 鈥淚t simply never runs out of surprises.鈥�
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