Murray Gell-Mann enjoys re-reading The Quark and the Jaguar (Abacus,
1995), but since he’s the author this doesn’t really count. Finnegans
Wake by James Joyce (Viking Penguin, 1999) comes close. It’s where Gell-Mann
first came across the word “quark”, 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)—and his wife.
For imaginative fiction, Gell-Mann recommends the books of Thomas…
