Hello! Fun fact, I am a textbook collector, and like the aesthetics of a nice bookcase. I use it as a source of motivation when coming into the office, and hope that one day I will be one of those professors that has a nice bookcase in the future.

I am going to write here which books I have read since the start of second year of graduate school. I will also write a quick blurb about each book to provide some guidance for those to come afte me.

High Energy Physics

General Relativity

Sean Caroll - “An Introduction to General Relativity: Spacetime and Geometry”

I have read this book cover to cover, and found it a good introduction to the topic. If you plan on reading all of the main texts on GR, I would say this is a good starting point.

It introduced all of the main topics one would be interested in, but mainly serves as an overview of the landscape, rather than a deep dive into any one topic.

I found the appendices enjoyable, and they are a little story of their own, once you have finished the main text. They should definitely be read sequentially because a lot of them play off the previous appendix.

Quantum Field Theory

Mark Srednicki - “Quantum Field Theory”

I am working through this book currently as it is being used in my QFT course. So far I have only gotten through the first 34 chapters, but that covers the first part on scalar field theory.

I found the beginning of this book to be very straightforward until loop corrections started playing a role. It wasn’t until I went back through, and had done problems that I understood what was going on for one-loop corrections. After the loop corrections I thought the rest of Part One was easier sailing.

Mathematical Physics

Differential Geometry

Chris J Isham - “Modern Differential Geometry for Physicists”

So far I have read the first three chapters of this book. I have had some introduction to the subject before, but this has definitely helped me build some extra intuition. I have found a lot of the tie-ins to physics to be very nice. A lot of times books will low ball the physics knowledge, but I have found this book to use examples that are a step-up from other texts.

Non-Textbooks

Biographies

Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

I read this book in high school, and it was my first introduction to upper level physics. I thought it was well written, and plan to reread it some time in my graduate career.

Albert and Joan Baez - A Year in Baghdad

This book follows the life of the Baez family, where the father Albert is physicist on a UNESCO mission to teach physics in Baghdad for a year. I read this book with my father, and we both enjoyed it. It was written in a way, that my father who is not in physics, or STEM for that matter, was able to enjoy the narrative.