Stacked up on the night stand next to his bed, Rocky Kolb, a cosmologist at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, has a heap of books he has finished but is too lazy to put in his bulging bookcases. Then there is a pile he is reading now, and a stack he intends to read when he has time: sometime in January 2023, he says.
He鈥檚 a fan of historical biographies and has just finished two by Joseph Ellis about founders of the US: American Sphinx: The character of Thomas Jefferson (Vintage, 1998) and Founding Brothers (Vintage, 2002). He is looking forward to reading the biography of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, No Time To Be Brief by Charles Enz (Oxford, 2002).
Popular science books are another favourite. He has started on The Prophet and the Astronomer by Marcelo Gleiser (W.W. Norton, 2002) and has just finished Strange Matters by Tom Siegfried (Joseph Henry, 2002).
Advertisement
Kolb even has a collection for when his laptop battery goes flat on plane journeys. He enjoyed Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells (Pan, 2002) because 鈥渋t reminds me of the colourful characters I knew as a child in Louisiana鈥�. Every year he trades books with his son Jeff: 鈥淭his year he gave me a few books by Terry Pratchett.鈥� He鈥檚 got The Colour of Magic (Corgi, 1985) lined up. 鈥淥f course,鈥� he says, 鈥渇or a really great time I reread Blind Watchers of the Sky (Perseus, 1997). Author? Rocky Kolb.