Ophelia de Vere

  Six books on reality, history, technology, power & one novel I couldn’t leave behind Technically, the first book I bought in Oxford began somewhere on the way there. I was listening to an episode of Sleep on Physics about one of those questions that sounds deceptively simple until physics gets involved: does quantum physics need consciousness? By the time I arrived in Oxford, the question had lodged itself somewhere in my head. Then I walked into Blackwell’s and found Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of Things . There are worse places for an impulse purchase. Oxford is, of course, particularly dangerous if you have this sort of disposition. It is a city built around the idea that following a question wherever it leads is a perfectly reasonable way to spend a life. And its bookshops make it extraordinarily easy to turn those questions into additional kilograms of luggage. I came home with six books. Looking at them now, they make for a slightly peculiar reading list: quantum p...