Reading

The books, papers and articles the rest of this site is built out of. Kept in public partly so the argument can be checked, and partly because a claim about physics made by someone who will not say where he read it is not worth much.

THE LIST IS NOT UP YET

This page has its shelves and its standard, and no titles on it. That is deliberate rather than unfinished: the previous version of this domain held a marketing resource library, and rather than relabel those entries as though they had always belonged to a site about attachment and time, they were removed.

What replaces them has to be read first. The list will arrive in pieces rather than all at once.

01 · The standard

What earns a place here

A reading list is an argument about what counts as evidence, so it is worth saying what the test is before anything is on it.

01
I have actually read it
Not skimmed, not encountered secondhand in someone else’s summary. A list padded with books I know only by reputation would be a claim about my shelves rather than my thinking.
02
It says which register it is in
Popular physics is full of books that slide from the mathematics into the metaphysics without marking the join. The ones listed here are the ones that mark it, whichever side they then argue for.
03
It complicates the argument
Books that support what I already think are easy to find and worth less. The most useful entries here will be the ones that made a chapter harder to write.
04
The note says why, not what
Every entry gets one line. Not a summary, which the publisher has already written better, but the reason it is on the list and what it changed.
02 · Shelves

How it will be sorted

The same five subjects used everywhere else on the site, so a book and an essay on the same shelf are making claims of the same kind.

Relationships
Attachment, insecurity, neglect and repair. The clinical literature and the good popular writing on top of it.
Philosophy
Free will, participation, personal identity, and what it means to be the cause of something.
Psychology
Primary research where I can follow it, and the honest secondary writing where I cannot. Replication failures included.
Physics and time
The literal register. Spacetime, the block universe, measurement, and the interpretation debates as debates rather than settled results.
Fourth dimension
The metaphysical register, shelved separately and labelled as such, so nothing here inherits the authority of the shelf above it.

In the meantime

The first book carries its own references, which is the fullest account of the sources until this page catches up. If there is something here I should have read, the contact page is the place to say so.

The books The writing Suggest something