Three months of the year gone already. What have I been reading?

The non-fiction I have most enjoyed (and learnt the most from) is Stephen Greenblatt’s immensely readable *The Swerve* about the rediscovery of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. I had been meaning to read the book for a while, so thanks to James Marriott’s always-interesting Substack Cultural Capital for providing the final prompt to get a copy. The book has its critics, but I found it gripping and hugely enlightening.

And new fiction? I much enjoyed Ali Smith’s *Glyph* — and that prompted me to reread, with great pleasure, what I still think is her best book, *How to be Both*. Evidently, though, Ali Smith divides her readers — she is one of the few authors that Mrs Logic Matters and I just don’t at all see eye to eye on.

I also raced through Julian Barnes’ latest book *Departure(s)* — I have long been a great fan of Barnes’ writing, fiction and non-fiction alike. And reading this — his last book (or so he announces) — I realised that we had never got a copy of Barnes’ first book, *Metroland*. The omission has been rectified. And period piece though it is, we both very much enjoyed it.

But the stand-out book for me in the last months of winter was this year’s Dickens, *Great Expectations*. There just are so many wonderful set pieces, episodes that really demand to be declaimed and read out loud round a fire … I resisted, while hugely admiring. The very ending, however? Dickens’ first thoughts were surely the truer.

Three shortish blog posts so far on Noson Yanofsky’s new book on Monoidal Category Theory. I can’t say that I am very enthusiastic about the early chapters so far.

At https://www.logicmatters.net/blog

Headline news. A third edition of *Introducing Category Theory* is now available (free PDF/cheap pbk). Info/link at https://www.logicmatters.net/categories

Please spread the word!
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There comes a tipping point, when the prospect of yet another round of proof-reading becomes intolerable and you think, dammit, the book as it is will now just have to do! So I have drawn a line, put the latest version online, set up the printing of a paperback, and will organize a hardback too.

I asked Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT whether the result should be deemed a ‘Revised second edition’ or a ‘Third edition’. I had inclined to the first option. But the original second edition is error-strewn just enough for me not want to students to use it any more. And the shared opinion of my wise friends is that, in such a case, it is good practice to signal that the old version has been not just polished but superseded by calling the new version a third edition. Who am I to disagree?

As I have said before, I should apologize for putting (partial or full) earlier versions of these notes out into the world as paperbacks in a half-baked state. But my excuse is that, with a major heart operation looming, and then its aftermath, I wanted to have something done, not knowing what the future would hold. Hopefully, this third edition can now rest in a stable state. And I can move on!

You can find the paperback on your local Amazon, with the ISBN 1068346728. The price remains within pennies/cents of the very minimum possible.

The first issue of the new *Journal for the Philosophy of Mathematics* appeared back in September 2024. A second issue, now edited by Alex Paseau, has now appeared, just a day before the end of 2025. This is a collection of just seven, again mostly invited, pieces. And despite the officially quite wide-ranging remit of the journal, five of the seven papers are about sets and pluralities.

However, on a quick first browse, the papers — particularly those on set theory — do look to be very promising and seriously interesting. So do check out the freely downloadable, open-access, issue.

And I do hope the Journal is now properly under way, and beginning to receive enough unsolicited pieces of similar quality.

(A minor thing, no doubt, but the way the Journal is produced for online reading strikes me as very elegantly done: all praise to the designer.)

Link: https://riviste.fupress.net/index.php/jpm